Peter Kuhn, Scripps, "Fluid Phase Biopsy in Solid Tumors"

Pointed out the AACR talk, "It's our time."

Step back now and then and then try to see if there's a simple solution (e.g., look for a single mutation in a single gene!).

Fluid-phase biopsy: first studied in 1869.

Trying to study the fluid phase of solid tumors, for

• enabling earlier diagnosis
• better staging
• improved therapeutic selection

by chacterization of circulating tumor cells (CTCs).

How to study:

1. collect cancer tissue from primary site and circulatory system
2. investigate physics, topology, genomics
3. correlate through math and stats

 Areas:

• Cytophysics
• Topology
• Dynomics (?! that's not a misspelling)

 Have developed next-gen solution to detecting CTCs in blood.

• With this technology, can distinguish the difference between HER2/non-HER2 populations!
• Can be used to track course of cancer (e.g., by looking a CTC load vs. time)

Important questions that can be answered by this research:

• tumor growth over time
• kinds of tumor cells that can be CTCs

Needs to be coupled with study of heterogeneity of CTCs:

• what makes them different from non-circulating tumor cells?
• how heterogeneous are the CTCs themselves?

Important question: how important is the data coming out of this technology for diagnosis, treatment, and outcome?

Interesting discussion afterwards contrasting counting vs. characterization of cell types.