University of Central Florida professor and Head of Cancer Division, Annette Khaled, talks about a new way to track metastatic cancer.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News in 2023.
How would you normally check metastatic cancer cells?
Khaled: So the way we’d normally track metastatic cancer cells is that there’s no way to track metastatic cancer cells. Right now we really don’t have any technology to do that. It’s basically done on symptoms and there is a method of counting the number of circulating tumor cells and blood but it’s very underused at this point. So there really is not a good method for that.
What does the new way of checking cells consist of?
Khaled: So what we’ve been developing in the lab is a way of detecting the types of cells that are released from metastatic tumors all over the body that are shed into the blood and we’re using a specific marker to find those cells that’s never been used before.
In layman’s terms, what is a liquid biopsy?
Khaled: Liquid biopsy is really just taking any body fluid, blood, urine, saliva, and analyzing it for something that a tumor cell has shed into that fluid.
What was the outcome of this research or the study so far?
Khaled: So the outcome hasn’t really been a method of diagnostic method that can be used to take patients blood for example, a woman with metastatic breast cancer or a man with metastatic- metastatic prostate cancer and take that blood from these individuals and track tumor cells that are in that blood.
How does this change the medical field?
Khaled: Well, haven’t changed it yet, but I’m really hoping that as we move forward we can start testing these now have a large number of patients. We can now add an additional diagnostic that doctors can use when they have patients with advanced or metastatic cancers, and that will help inform them as to whether they need to change the patient’s treatments or advance some sort of therapeutic options.
What do you hope will happen in the future with this new research?
Khaled: Well, I really hope that we don’t need it in the future. I hope that as we move forward we have better methods and treatments for metastatic cancers. But in the interim this will help to pick up the cancers in the early stage of metastasis before they had a chance or to spread throughout the body. And the earlier, you can identify a patient with metastasis, the better chance for successful treatments.
How soon do you think you can see this being used in actual patients?
Khaled: Well, it’ll take a little time, it’ll take a lot of money. But if we can get the funding that we need to start doing large-scale patient clinical trials, maybe three to four years.
What can this research to do for a patient’s quality of life?
Khaled: I think the benefit is because liquid biopsy only requires drawing blood or taking a body fluid. It’s not invasive, patients can do this more often and it gives them peace of mind. So you can test very easily in a doctor’s office whether you have metastatic cancer whether your cancer has recurred. So this would be for- for patients who have had cancer, the cancer has been removed or is in remission and it gives them peace of mind. They can easily test to see if the cancer has come back or recurred instead of having to wait till you actually have a symptom or undergo some invasive biopsy or- or imaging methods.
Can this be applied to other cancers beside breast cancer?
Khaled: Yes. And I’m very excited that you actually can use, as I mentioned, we can use it for metastatic breast cancer, for lung cancer, we’ve tested it in prostate cancer, we even developed a version for pediatric cancer called neuroblastoma. And this type of cancers occurs in infants less than a year old. And so this is- you can imagine doing a biopsy and a one-year-old be able to draw just a small amount of blood and be able to use that to detect cancer is really helpful and these types of- are very difficult cancers in children.
END OF INTERVIEW
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