Study says, biomarker in liquid biopsy for lung cancer can be more reliable than tumour biopsy

Jun 03, 2022

New Delhi, June 03 (ANI): Mount Sinai researchers have proven that a simple blood test called a liquid biopsy can be a stronger predictor of whether cancer immunotherapy will work for a patient with lung cancer than an invasive tumour biopsy technique. The study has been published in the journal, “Experimental & Clinical Cancer Research”. The liquid biopsy tests for a biomarker of PD-L1, a protein and targets a type of immunotherapy called checkpoint inhibitors, which helps the patient's immune system attack and kill cancer cells. This study showed that testing the blood of lung cancer patients for the PD-L1 biomarker gave more accurate predictions of the response and survival for patients with lung cancer than testing for PD-L1 in tissue from lung cancer biopsies, the current standard of care. The biomarker in blood, named EV PD-L1, comes from extracellular vesicles, which are particles shed from tumour cells. A decrease of PD-L1 in extracellular vesicles in blood could therefore become a useful test to predict which patients with non-small-cell lung cancer could benefit from immunotherapy.