BLOODPAC Publishes a Roadmap for Early Cancer Detection and Screening using Liquid Biopsy
A new perspective from the members of BLOODPAC’s Early Detection and Screening working group on the transformative potential of blood-based tests in cancer screening was published online in Clinical and Translational Science this month. The paper lays out the current challenges in widespread, multi-cancer screening and liquid biopsy testing, and provides a roadmap for how the field can overcome these barriers.
As the authors note, one of the silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a renewed vision of what kinds of population-wide molecular diagnostic initiatives are possible. In the oncology space, screening for a handful of cancers–colorectal, breast, lung, and cervical–is currently recommended in the general population, but the majority of cancers are only detected once symptoms are present. Blood-based screening is a promising opportunity to address this unmet need and offers potentially enormous public-health improvements in early cancer detection.
But as with any ambitious public health goal, collaboration is key in bringing about a future in which everyone can benefit from the potentially life-saving technology offered by liquid biopsy. BLOODPAC was founded on this principle, and this new paper brings the lens of collaboration to the task of accelerating early cancer detection and screening.
For example, among the many challenges addressed in the paper is the difficulty in generating robust clinical evidence to support the validity and utility of blood-based cancer screening tests. Solutions proposed include adopting different approaches to clinical trial design to reduce the need for costly and slow large-scale validation, and the development of a standardized lexicon and quantitative measures of success across the field of cancer screening, to make it easier to assess benefit in clinical trials. These solutions require collaboration across stakeholders from industry, academia, and regulatory bodies to create standards and frameworks to facilitate these initiatives, something that BLOODPAC has already pioneered.
In this work, BLOODPAC’s ED+S working group has produced a rigorous, practical and creative report on how to bring about broader development, approval, and implementation of blood-based screening tests, with real-world actions that the consortium is currently working on.
