Assays for Liquid Biopsy

Liquid biopsy is a diagnostic method that analyzes biological fluids such as blood or urine to detect and monitor diseases such as cancer. Unlike the traditional practice of tissue biopsy, liquid biopsy is a minimally invasive and easily accessible approach for detecting gene mutations and other disease-related biomarkers. This innovative approach offers the added benefit of real-time monitoring, allowing healthcare professionals to continuously evaluate the effectiveness of treatments and track disease progression over time.

Tumor cells release genetic information into the bloodstream, providing the opportunity to study genetic alterations. These genetic traces are detectable as circulating tumor cells (CTC) or cell-free DNA (cfDNA) and are present in blood only in extremely small amounts, which has necessitated the development of state-of-the-art techniques such as digital PCR (dPCR) for the highly sensitive detection of nucleic acids.

Imminent Treatment by Earlier Detection

In addition to its application in cancer diagnostics, liquid biopsy is also used to monitor graft injury after transplantation. As cells experience damage, apoptosis, or graft injury, higher levels of cfDNA are released into the bloodstream. This graft-originated DNA becomes identifiable in a standard blood sample collected from the patient. Consequently, graft-derived cfDNA has been suggested as a biomarker for the non-invasive identification of allograft rejection.

BIOTYPE’s digital PCR assays for research purposes target INDEL loci and determine DNA ratios through a series of 59 duplex assays with the highest sensitivity.