NeXT Liquid Biopsy: A High-Performance, Exome-Wide Liquid Biopsy Assay to Study Tumor Dynamics – Broadcast 1

While solid tumor biopsies remain the standard for the interrogation of the cancer genome, the advent of liquid biopsies and multi-region tissue sampling has demonstrated that there can be more to a cancer’s genotypic profile than that found in a single tissue biopsy. NeXT Liquid Biopsy™, a first-of-its-kind, high-performance, exome-wide liquid biopsy assay, is designed to complement ImmunoID NeXT™, providing a unique ability to further evaluate the cancer ecosystem and advance the development of next-generation therapies. The combination of NeXT Liquid Biopsy and ImmunoID NeXT delivers the most comprehensive view of a cancer’s mutational landscape by evaluating both the tissue and the blood.

NeXT Liquid Biopsy enables investigation into key applications, such as spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the tumor, clonal evolution and tumor dynamics in response to therapies, and mechanisms of acquired resistance. NeXT Liquid Biopsy is purpose-built to navigate the inherent variability of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), elucidating key areas of tumor biology not often addressed by targeted, commercially available liquid biopsy panels.

To enable sensitive variant detection across 20,000 genes, this enhanced exome assay and chemistry achieves high sequencing depth of approximately 2,000x exome-wide, with additional boosted depth, 5,000x, for 247 cancer-related genes. Personalis has developed a computational pipeline optimized to lower the noise floor for variant detection, providing sensitive monitoring and de novo detection of variants over multiple time points.

Personalis evaluated the performance of their NeXT Liquid Biopsy platform in three ways. First, they assessed sensitivity. Analyzing SeraCare^Ⓡ reference materials at multiple allele frequency (AF) dilutions, their platform identified all 25 single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) at 1% AF and above, present in the reference, and detected 24 out of 25 events at 0.5% dilution. To evaluate sensitivity at the whole-exome scale, Personalis developed a cell culture media system that models the shedding of tumor DNA fragments seen in human plasma samples. They achieved over 95% sensitivity for variants with an AF greater than, or equal to, 2%, and between 85% to 92% for variants with an AF of 1% to 2%. Second, they estimated false-positive rates on a set of plasma samples using digital droplet PCR. Lastly, Personalis demonstrated their ability to longitudinally monitor treatment response using a clinical cancer cohort on checkpoint therapy, profiling putative tumor evolution while on therapy.

Join this webinar for a discussion of the data demonstrating the genomic profiling and assay performance enabled by NeXT Liquid Biopsy through the evaluation of various reference standards and actual patient samples.

Participants can select from 2 live broadcasts. Register below to attend at 8am EST (NA) / 1pm GMT (UK) / 2pm CET (EU-Central), or click here to register for 4pm EST (1pm PST).

Speakers

Sean Michael Boyle, PhD, Senior Director, Bioinformatics Applications, Personalis Inc.

Sean is Sr. Director of Bioinformatics Applications at Personalis, with broad experience across analysis and interpretation of cancer genomics data. At Personalis, Sean leads a team focused on development of tools for neoantigen prediction, cell-free applications, tumor microenvironment analysis, and biomarker analysis for the ImmunoID NeXT Platform®. His team is also applying these technologies through external scientific collaborations with both academic and industry partners. Prior to Personalis, Sean worked on advancing genomics and personalized genomic medicine, notably with the Dr. Mike Snyder lab at Stanford University, where he developed novel methods for analyzing and interpreting patient samples from both cancer and inherited disease.

Message Presenter

Dan Norton, MBA, Senior Product Manager, Personalis Inc.

Dan Norton joined Personalis in 2018 and is responsible for the commercial and managerial aspects of Personalis’ liquid biopsy portfolio. Prior to joining Personalis, Dan was a senior global product manager at Bio-Rad Laboratories, responsible for launching the company’s first single-cell sequencing products – RNA-Seq and ATAC-Seq. Prior to Bio-Rad, Dan worked as a global product manager at Illumina, launching several targeted sequencing library preparation products.

Message Presenter