Using liquid biopsies to study cancer dynamics and drug resistance
Alessandro Romanel, Assistant Professor @ Centre of Integrative Biology (CIBIO)
A liquid biopsy is a test done on a sample of blood to look for cancer cells or for pieces of DNA from tumor cells that are circulating in the blood. In this talk I will introduce the notion of liquid biopsy and report how a minimally invasive blood test can be developed using next-generation sequencing technology on circulating tumor DNA obtained from plasma. I will also show the capacity of this test to interrogate for disease evolution and identify genomic aberrations that emerge with drug resistance.