Laboratory Considerations for Clinical Trials

A liquid biopsy is a minimally invasive alternative to a more traditional surgical solid tumor biopsy.

In this episode, Dr. Stephanie Hastings, genomics product lead at Q Squared Solutions, lays out the considerations for liquid biopsy collection and the type of information that can be gathered from circulating free DNA (cfDNA).

The main approaches comprise for evaluating cfDNA are:

1. specific mutation detection to help support targeted therapies
2. broader sequencing technologies to enable biomarker evaluations
3. custom sequencing panels to support clinical trial assay development

She describes the typical panels for each of the approaches, the sample collection requirements and how these analyses are implemented on a global scale.