Dr. Gilberto Lopes, Chief of the Division of Medical Oncology and Associate Director of the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami, explores the evolving landscape of targeted therapy and how liquid biopsy — combining ctDNA and ctRNA analysis — supports personalized treatment planning. LiquidHALLMARK® by Lucence is an ultra-sensitive liquid biopsy test that analyzes ctDNA and ctRNA to enable tailored treatment decisions.

Lucence's liquid biopsy product is not indicated or intended as a companion diagnostic, is not indicated or intended to to supplant physician medical judgment, and is not indicated or intended to diagnose and/or to identify appropriate treatment options for a particular condition or disease.

The statements made by Dr. Lopes represent the expertise of Dr. Lopes, specifically, and do not necessarily represent the views of Lucence as an organization. Dr. Lopes is a paid consultant of Lucence.

Video Transcript: My name is Gilberto Lopes. I'm a medical oncologist, which means I'm a doctor who sees patients living with cancer. And I do research trying to improve the length and quality of life of people living with the disease.

One of the most revolutionary changes in the way we treat lung cancer today has been the advent of targeted therapies and immune treatments.

In targeted therapies, we can find specific mutations that are driving a patient's tumor, a patient's cancer, and we can try to find medications that will really target that specific mutation, that one change that has made the disease what it is.

We've had a case in our county hospital of a young woman of Chinese ethnicity who had presented with worsening respiratory failure, ended up needing to be intubated in a ventilator. And we were able to get a biopsy that made a diagnosis of lung cancer.

But unfortunately beyond that, we did not have enough tissue to do genomic tests, next generation sequencing. For patients that are in such a severe state as she was, sometimes it's difficult for us to do biopsies because of the risk inherent to doing CT-guided fine needle aspirations as well as different types of biopsies. Most of the liquid biopsy tests we have, which are just blood tests that check for genetic material, actually use DNA only as the genetic material that is tested. And we did one of the standard ctDNA only. And that test was negative.

That's when we did a special ctRNA liquid biopsy, which also tests for that different genetic material we call RNA, and that test found the fusion we call ALK.

And specifically having the ctRNA portion of the liquid biopsy is what allowed us to find her ALK fusion, and that's how we were able to give her targeted therapy that got her out of the ICU, and back home with her family. And a year later when we saw her, she had almost no evidence of disease in her CT scans.

This is a great example of the benefits we can have today with targeted agents. We have to understand what it is, what the specific diagnosis in terms of pathology is, and as important, we also need to know what mutations, what the genomic makeup of the tumor is, so that we can offer the treatment that has the best chance of improving a patient's quality of life and survival.