Blood is a readily available and rich source of biomarkers that have the potential for use in diagnostics and companion diagnostics development, disease characterization and monitoring, and predictive drug response and toxicity analysis. Serum profiling using a variety of techniques to identify disease- or treatment-related proteins, antibodies, or oligonucleotides is leading to the identification of well-defined biosignatures and patterns of biomarker expression that are playing an important role in research, preclinical testing, patient stratification for clinical trials, therapeutic assessment, and increasingly in commercial diagnostic and prognostic applications and in drug selection.
VeriStrat from Biodesix is an example of a serum-based test used in the clinic that can predict response to a second-line biotherapeutic treatment option. The test identifies patients who are likely or unlikely to benefit from treatment with erlotinib, an EGFR-TKI in patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Read more at GEN