liquid biopsies Flashcards
What is personalised medicine?
- model that moves from one-size fit all medicine to new approaches which helps better manage patients health, and targeted therapy for best outcomes.
- liquid biposies are used for personalised medicine.
Define liquid bioposies.
- sampling and analysing of non-solid biological tissue, primarily blood. It is a minimally invasive technology for detection of molecular biomarkers.
What are examples of liquid biopsies?
- urine
- bloods
- saliva
- CSF (useful for circulating tumour DNA)
What are advantages of liquid biopsies?
- minimal invasive technology
- liquid biopsy sample is representative of tissue from which it has spread.
What is an example of well known liquid biopsy?
- amniotic fluid analysis
- sex test, chromosomal abnormalities can be identified by analysing this liquid biopsy.
Why can we use blood as a liquid biopsy?
- cells are continuously renovating , cell death leads to different turnover of material.
- some material is continuously being released in the blood stream.
What is found in the blood biopsy sample?
- circulating endothelial cells
- circulating tumour cells (CDC)
- disseminated tumour cells (DTCs)
- tumour educated platelets (TEPs)
- extracellular micro-vesicles (exosomes)
- metabolites
How can you extract liquid biopsies?
-10mL blood collected by venipuncture (4-5mL plasma)
Why is important to use a special EDTA extraction tubes when collecting blood?
to prevent:
- blood clots
- genomic DNA release (from WBC)
- haemolysis
What are properties and logistic and storage of EDTA, citrate?
-contain anticoagulant to prevent clotting.
Logistic and storage:
-onsite centrifugation within 6hrs of collection to isolate plasma and avoid WBC apoptosis.
if not possible, sample can be stored at 4 degree for upto a week.
What are properties and logistic and storage of cell-free DNA tubes(eg. paxgene-qiagen; streck)?
-contain stabilisers to prevent release of gDNA from white blood and haemolysis of RBC.
logistic and storage:
- samples can be stored for 6-14 days at 6-37 degrees.
- more convenient in terms of transport and storage.
What do you see after 15 mins of centrifugation at 2,000x g speed at 4 degree?
- plasma (55%):
- ctDNA and exosomes
- water, proteins, nutrients, hormones, etc. - Buffy coat (<1%)
- WBC, platelets , CTCs - Hematocrit (45%)
- RBC
What are 2 biomarkers in liquid biopsies?
- circulating tumour cells (CTC)
2. circulating tumour DNA(ctDNA)
What are characteristics of circulating tumour cells(CTCs)?
- cells that have detached from a tumour and travel through the bloodstream to other parts of the body - single cells or clusters.
- marker for tumour growth and negative cancer prognosis and treatment response
- extremely rare 1-10 per 1ml of blood
- found in a high background of normal cells - sensitive and specific methods are needed to study them
What is isolation and characterisation of CTCs based on?
- biological and physical properties (size, electrical charge)
- identified/characterised based on transcripts - PCR done on total RNA extracted from the cells.