Articles related to BIOMARKERS

A Narrative Review Liquid biopsy is increasingly being used clinically in advanced lung cancer, according to this review, and ongoing research is identifying applications of circulating tumor DNA-based testing that complement tissue analysis across a wide range of clinical settings. At many stages of the patient’s oncologic journey, circulating tumor DNA technologies are demonstrating potential benefits for patients, health care practitioners, health care systems, and researchers.

A Q&A with John N. Allan, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, who discusses the changing role of prognostic markers, the usefulness of the markers, the biomarkers that should be part of standard testing, when patients should be tested, and much more.

The authors engaged in research to attempt to identify circulating biomarkers for pancreatic NETs, to improve tumor surveillance and quality of life. They examined the expression of circulating miRNA in the serum of MEN1 patients and found an inverse relationship between miR-3156-5p and MORF4L2 expression, representing a potential serum biomarker that could facilitate the detection of NET occurrence in MEN1 patients.

Panelists conclude that sNfL can be used as a biomarker to assess response totreatment in future trials. In the clinic setting, it could become valuable in directingtherapy; for example, in cases in which the patient is absent clinical signs of aggressiveMS and it’s unclear if they will benefit from infused, injected, or oral disease-modifyingtherapy.

Selecting effective antidepressants for the treatment of major depressive disorder is an imprecise practice. With remission rates of about 30% after the initial therapy selection, there is a need to uncover biomarkers able to predict treatment response. This study looked at pharmacogenomic testing for drug-gene interactions to guide treatment selection. Unfortunately, they did not find significantly improved outcomes.

Immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI)-refractory cancers are arguably one of the greatest unmet needs in oncology. In this randomized phase II substudy, patients ineligible for a biomarker-matched previously treated with ICI and platinum-based chemotherapy and progressive disease at least 84 days after initiation of ICI were randomly assigned to receive ramucirumab plus pembrolizumab (RP) or investigator’s choice standard of care (SOC: docetaxel/ramucirumab, docetaxel, gemcitabine, and pemetrexed). The study’s primary objective was to compare overall survival (OS). The median OS was 14.5 months for RP and 11.6 months for SOC. Docetaxel and ramucirumab were the most common SOC, received by 2/3 of patients. This randomized phase II trial demonstrated significantly improved OS with RP compared with SOC in patients with advanced NSCLC previously treated with ICI and chemotherapy.