Last week we brought you a story on a liquid biopsy test showing “superior sensitivity” in detecting HPV-associated head and neck cancers.
Researchers at Mass Eye and Ear developed the test – known as HPV-DeepSeek – which achieved 99% sensitivity and 99% specificity for “diagnosing cancer at the time of first clinical presentation, including for the very earliest stages of disease.”
The team at Mass Eye and Ear is building on the success of HPV-DeepSeek by conducting clinical trials to study “the effectiveness of detecting microscopic residual disease remaining after surgery, which could inform whether additional treatments like radiation therapy are needed.”
Today, liquid biopsy is being used not only for early detection, it is informing personalized treatment as well. According to researchers, this is an area of growing study across other forms of head and neck cancer.
In a study published in Clinical Cancer Research, Daniel Faden, MD, and his team tested a different novel assay called MAESTRO in patients with head and neck cancer not caused by HPV to look for evidence of cancer remaining after surgery.
Dr. Faden is a principal investigator in the Mike Toth Head and Neck Cancer Research Center and Surgical Oncologist at Mass Eye and Ear.
The approach was developed at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard, and according to the research team, it improves sensitivity by using “a specialized approach to detect genome-wide tumor DNA with minimal sequencing.”
The researchers found the test could accurately detect residual cancer – cancer cells that remain in the body after treatment – within a few days of surgery in a highly aggressive form of head and neck cancer. They also discovered that patients with residual disease detected by the assay had “significantly worse survival and recurrence outcomes.”
“People have always wondered whether more sensitive liquid biopsy tests will start to detect residual cancer that won’t lead to recurrence,” said Viktor Adalsteinsson, PhD. Adalsteinsson directs the Gerstner Center for Cancer Diagnostics at the Broad Institute, and his team developed MAESTRO.
“In this study, MAESTRO not only detected residual cancer in more patients who experienced future recurrence or death but also was highly predictive for it,” he added.
“Whole-genome sequencing liquid biopsy approaches, like HPV-DeeSeek and MEASTRO used in these studies, are enormously powerful, allowing physicians to look for many hundreds or thousands of needles in haystacks as opposed to just a few, drastically increasing sensitivity,” said Faden. “For patients, this means significantly more accurate results and being one step closer to truly personalized care.”
