Confession: I have been burned by Guardant twice. Both times were my fault, the first on account of my wide-eyed idealism and the other because I didn’t stick to my guns when it counted, but this has seeded a personal and possibly misdirected venom toward the company.
It helps that the product sucks. Continue reading “Liquid Biopsy Continues to Disappoint”
We know the narrative: liquid biopsy promises a safe, painless, non-invasive, less-costly method of interrogating tumor DNA to identify targeted therapies for patients who are not amenable to biopsy. Patients will have a real-time view into the resistance patterns of their disease (companies are promoting the idea that patients should have a biopsy after every line of therapy, which was never feasible with tissue biopsy) and be equipped to select treatments that are more likely to work.
All this from a couple vials of blood? Well. Not so fast. Continue reading “My Experience with Liquid Biopsy”
The NEJM, despite its habit of publishing every precision medicine milestone in the past 15 years (including the Herceptin and Zelboraf papers cited in the first paragraph of this editorial), elected to give voice to the naysayers: per an opinion from physicians at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, treating cancer based on genomic profiling is unproven, expensive, toxic, and requires further investigation in controlled trials before we should consider it as a treatment strategy. No shock that this came out of Canada, that hotbed of medical innovation.
Continue reading “Oh, Canada. “Limits to Personalized Cancer Care” in the NEJM”
B4 U Consent 