In addition to the traditional National Cherry Blossom Festival, this spring Washington, D.C. will welcome the AACR Annual Meeting 2017 on April 1-5!
We’ll be delighted to meet you at our booth (#1643) where you can learn more about our solutions dedicated to cancer research and biomarker discovery. We'll feature our complete portfolio of products dedicated to cancer research and biomarker testing.
Meet our experts and discuss sample prep, NGS kits and quality control, gene expression and miRNA regulation, pathway analysis and epigenetics, and solid tumor and blood cancer biomarkers.
We’re also hosting a Spotlight theater presentation and presenting several posters. Check out the following for details.
Topic: Achieving NGS insights using QIAGEN ‘Now Generation’ technologies
Date/time: 10:00 a.m., Tuesday, April 4
Location: Spotlight Theater A, Exhibit Hall A
Guest speaker: Monika Mehta, Ph.D., R&D Scientist, Sequencing Facility, Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNLCR), Leidos Biomedical Research, Inc., Advanced Technology Research Facility, Frederick, MD
Topic 1: Integrative approach to biomarker discovery by performing comparative analysis of two cancers, hepatocellular carcinoma and endometrioid endometrial carcinoma, using genetics and transcriptomics from RNA sequencing data
Date/time: Monday, April 3 – 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Location: Section 39, 2840 / 13
Topic 2: RNA profiles of circulating tumor cells and extracellular vesicles for therapy stratification of metastatic breast cancer patients
Date/time: Tuesday, April 4 – 8:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Location: Section 31, 3777 / 3
Topic 3: RNA fusion detection in thyroid nodules with a targeted RNA sequencing panel
Date/time: Wednesday, April 5 – 8:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Location: Section 17, 5408 / 19
We look forward to seeing you there.
We recently attended the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), held in New Orleans. As always at these events, we met many accomplished oncology researchers and customers who are working hard on the front lines to eradicate cancer. Thanks again to the many conference attendees who visited our booth to learn more about our bioinformatics tools.
The day before AACR kicked off, we announced the RNA-Seq Explorer Solution, which combines Ingenuity® Pathway Analysis™ and Biomedical Genomics Workbench® to offer clear insights for research into improved cancer detection, diagnosis, and treatment. This bioinformatics solution for liquid biopsy allows users to focus on biology, providing the tools to help drive research forward and to publish novel findings.
To share the finer points of our new solution, Principal Scientist Dr. Jean-Noel Billaud delivered a presentation entitled “Transcriptome analysis of Kupffer cells after uptake of pancreatic cancer exosomes reveal pathways and biological processes involved in metastatic progression.” If you missed the presentation, you can watch the recording of the talk below.
At AACR, we were also part of four poster sessions focused on recent oncology findings. With this impressive research as a backdrop to our new solution, we really look forward to seeing what the cancer research community will accomplish!
Get more details about our RNA-Seq Explorer Solution
https://clcbio.23video.com/v.ihtml/player.html?token=034602eadd660e8245519492de1b3317&source=embed&photo%5fid=13681108Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are tumor cells circulating freely in the peripheral blood of patients. The characterization of CTCs is considered as a real-time “liquid biopsy” that provides an ongoing picture of a patient’s cancer status, offering valuable insight into personalized anticancer therapy.
CTCs are very rare and highly heterogeneous, possessing tumor-specific antigenic and genetic characteristics. One of the most commonly used techniques to isolate CTCs is based on the enrichment of tumor cells that express epithelial cell adhesion molecules (EpCAM). This approach, however, can overlook CTC subpopulations that have undergone an epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). It is believed that this EMT process allows the dissemination of CTCs from primary tumors into the circulation. During the EMT process, CTCs lose their epithelial characteristics and acquire more mesenchymal-like phenotypes.
QIAGEN has developed an advanced system that allows enrichment of these cancer cell subtypes from patient blood samples. To accomplish this, we use an antibody-conjugated magnetic bead isolation followed by molecular profiling of captured CTCs. This innovative approach is based on a unique mix of antibodies directed against various tumor cell-associated antigens. By using this technique, you will be able to identify cellular changes in antigen profiles once they develop an EMT or tumor stem cell phenotype, thereby ensuring that your enrichment includes these potentially crucial cells for analysis. This system has been widely used in characterizing cancer progression for targeted therapies.
In a recent investigation from the lab of Dr. Sabine Kasimir-Bauer, Maren Bredemeier and colleagues used the panel AdnaTest EMT-2/Stem Cell Select (QIAGEN Hannover GmbH, Germany) to enrich and profile the expression of 46 genes in CTCs of metastatic breast cancer (MBC) patients. The study was based on 2×5 ml blood from 45 MBC patients and 20 healthy controls, collected at the time of disease progression (T0) and at 2 consecutive clinical stagings (T1 and T2).
One interesting finding is that the multidrug resistant protein gene MRP1 showed a significant difference in expression in overall responders to treatment vs overall nonresponders. In order of significance, VEGFR1, keratin (KRT) 19, EGFR, MET1, ALDH, progesterone receptor (PR), UPA, cathepsin D, KIT1 and Ki67 were differentially expressed in CTCs of patients who had developed liver metastasis as compared to patients without liver metastasis. The patients with liver metastasis showed a significantly lower level of estrogen receptor (ER), PR, HER2, mammaglobin and KRT19 compared to other patients. These preliminary results indicated that CTCs can not only be used as a monitoring tool to guide anticancer therapy, but also allow prediction of the site of metastasis, which may enable a more precise therapeutic decision.
To get more information about this application in MBC research, visit Poster 19, Section 23, at 1 p.m. – 5 p.m., on Sunday, Apr 17, 2016 at AACR in New Orleans.
Find more details about our activities at AACR.
Liquid biopsies show promise for cancer research, but technical challenges remain
Preparing for this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), we’ve been thinking about some of the most promising recent technology trends in oncology. One of our favorites is the advances in liquid biopsies as a way to earlier monitor cancer progression, and get a better sense of the genetic variation or expression profile present in a primary tumor or metastatic sites.
Most liquid biopsy studies look for one of three materials: cell-free DNA (cfDNA), circulating tumor cells (CTCs), or exosomes. As its name suggests, cfDNA is the genetic material released into the bloodstream from tumor cells that get lysed during apoptosis or some other process. CTCs are intact cells; in addition to the genetic information they can reveal about a tumor, they’re appealing because they may be cultured for a more sophisticated, longer-term analysis of how these cells function. Exosomes are vesicles released by cells as part of a cell-to-cell signaling network, among other important functions. They may contain RNAs or proteins produced by tumors or other cancerous cells. As scientists make inroads in liquid biopsy studies, it is becoming clear that a comprehensive picture of cancer requires information from as many of these sources as possible.
The biggest challenges with liquid biopsies right now involve finding signal in the noise. This occurs in two different phases: first, when blood or plasma is originally drawn from a patient. The cfDNA, CTCs, and exosomes from cancer cells are wildly outnumbered by material from healthy cells. Typically, liquid biopsies yield vanishingly small samples of interest for cancer research; significant efforts are underway to help solve this problem. A related challenge takes place in data analysis, where again the signal, identifying the driver variant or elucidating mechanisms driving the expression profile, from DNA or cells originating from a tumor can be very difficult to find in the wild-type noise. Analysis and interpretation solutions are being used to overcome this challenge as well.
We believe that liquid biopsies have the potential to transform the diagnosis and treatment of cancer patients. We’re delivering solutions that can help scientists conduct, analyse, and interpret liquid biopsy studies with greater precision and reliability.
We look forward to hearing more about this topic at AACR.
For additional updates, please visit the Biomarker Insights blog or see the schedule for our activities at AACR.
