Abstract
Chris Anderson
As someone who makes a living with words, I tend to get irritated when phrases are overused to the extent they become at best a cliché, and at worst, utterly meaningless. One that has long rankled me is the term “paradigm shift.” It has been so devalued over the years, that I have sworn a pact with myself never to use it lest I fall into the wide-eyed, gee-whiz trap countless others before me have when they want to describe a new technology in a cooler way than simply saying it is cool.
But I’m breaking my pact. I believe the use of liquid biopsy as a diagnostic tool for cancer will bring a paradigm shift in characterizing tumors, tracking disease progression, and monitoring treatment efficacy.
Certainly, I’m not alone in this view. The Cleveland Clinic listed liquid biopsy as Number 4 on its list of the top medical innovations for 2017, citing its central place in the federal government’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative and its future potential to diagnose cancer at its earliest stages via regular blood tests as part of an annual physical.
And not that we should place our trust in venture capital firms as prognosticators of the next big thing (Hello, Blackberry). After all, venture capitalists tend to make a lot of different bets on promising new technologies with the full knowledge that many of their bets will lose, but the winners will more than make up for them.
That said, it is difficult to ignore the money pouring into liquid biopsy companies, when Illumina spin-out Grail announces it has closed its Series B financing for a cool $900 million dollars—by far the largest amount ever raised by a biotech company. On the very same day Grail was setting its record, two-plus-year-old liquid biopsy company Freenome announced it had raised “only” $65 million to further develop its technology. In other words, liquid biopsy very nearly had a $1 billion day.
So what’s next for liquid biopsy companies, and what needs to happen for the technology to live up to its potential? Likely a lot of validation and clinical studies. While the publication last year of Dana Farber’s successful use of liquid biopsy to accurately detect and prescribe treatments for patients with specific mutations in metastatic non-small cell lung cancer set the cancer world abuzz, it is still the only cancer with a proven role for the technology.
In that regard, one could say liquid biopsy has yet to prove itself. But as more and more companies invest in clinical studies, the pace at which data accumulate showing the promise of this technology in breast cancer, prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, melanoma, and others will only accelerate—which suggests that its use in non-small cell lung cancer is merely the first few drops of what will soon be a liquid biopsy deluge.