Features Partner Sites Information LinkXpress hp
Sign In
Advertise with Us
LGC Clinical Diagnostics

Download Mobile App




Blood Test Predicts Lymphoma Therapy Success

By LabMedica International staff writers
Posted on 04 Sep 2018
Print article
Image: Bone marrow aspirate from a patient with diffuse large B cell lymphoma (Photo courtesy of Peter Maslak).
Image: Bone marrow aspirate from a patient with diffuse large B cell lymphoma (Photo courtesy of Peter Maslak).
A blood test can predict which patients with a type of cancer called diffuse large B cell lymphoma are likely to respond positively to initial therapy and which are likely to need more aggressive treatment.

Diffuse large B cell lymphoma, a blood cancer, is the most common type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and because it is highly biologically variable, patients vary widely in their response to treatment. Although most people are cured by conventional therapy, about one-third are not. Being able to predict early in the course of treatment those who will need additional or more aggressive therapies would be a significant boon to both clinicians and patients.

A large team of scientists led by Stanford Medicine (Stanford, CA, USA) tracked circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) levels in 217 people with diffuse large B cell lymphoma that were treated at six medical centers, three in the USA and three in Europe. For each patient, they compared levels of ctDNA before treatment began with the levels after the first and second rounds of conventional chemotherapy. They then correlated those changes with each patient's outcome.

The scientists found that ctDNA was detectable prior to the initiation of therapy in 98% of the people studied, and, as would be expected, the amount of ctDNA in the blood dropped in all patients once treatment began. However the precipitousness of the decline varied. Those people whose ctDNA levels dropped a hundredfold after the first round or three-hundredfold by the second round were much more likely to live 24 months or more without experiencing a recurrence of their disease than those whose ctDNA levels declined more slowly.

David M. Kurtz, MD, PhD, the lead author of the study, said, “We found that ctDNA levels serve as a very sensitive and specific biomarker of response to therapy within as few as 21 days. Every year, about 30,000 people in the USA are diagnosed with diffuse large B cell lymphoma and, for the most part, they're treated with six cycles of combination therapy. But we know that not all patients need six cycles. A large fraction could be cured with fewer cycles, maybe even just two. If we can identify those people who are responding extremely well, we could spare them additional treatments. Conversely, we could intensify the therapy or seek other options for those who are not responding as well as we would have hoped.” The study was published on August 20, 2018, in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Related Links:
Stanford Medicine

Gold Member
Veterinary Hematology Analyzer
Exigo H400
Verification Panels for Assay Development & QC
Seroconversion Panels
New
Fecal DNA Extraction Kit
QIAamp PowerFecal Pro DNA Kit
New
Gold Member
Human Chorionic Gonadotropin Test
hCG Quantitative - R012

Print article

Channels

Clinical Chemistry

view channel
Image: The tiny clay-based materials can be customized for a range of medical applications (Photo courtesy of Angira Roy and Sam O’Keefe)

‘Brilliantly Luminous’ Nanoscale Chemical Tool to Improve Disease Detection

Thousands of commercially available glowing molecules known as fluorophores are commonly used in medical imaging, disease detection, biomarker tagging, and chemical analysis. They are also integral in... Read more

Immunology

view channel
Image: The cancer stem cell test can accurately choose more effective treatments (Photo courtesy of University of Cincinnati)

Stem Cell Test Predicts Treatment Outcome for Patients with Platinum-Resistant Ovarian Cancer

Epithelial ovarian cancer frequently responds to chemotherapy initially, but eventually, the tumor develops resistance to the therapy, leading to regrowth. This resistance is partially due to the activation... Read more

Microbiology

view channel
Image: The lab-in-tube assay could improve TB diagnoses in rural or resource-limited areas (Photo courtesy of Kenny Lass/Tulane University)

Handheld Device Delivers Low-Cost TB Results in Less Than One Hour

Tuberculosis (TB) remains the deadliest infectious disease globally, affecting an estimated 10 million people annually. In 2021, about 4.2 million TB cases went undiagnosed or unreported, mainly due to... Read more

Pathology

view channel
Image: The ready-to-use DUB enzyme assay kits accelerate routine DUB activity assays without compromising data quality (Photo courtesy of Adobe Stock)

Sensitive and Specific DUB Enzyme Assay Kits Require Minimal Setup Without Substrate Preparation

Ubiquitination and deubiquitination are two important physiological processes in the ubiquitin-proteasome system, responsible for protein degradation in cells. Deubiquitinating (DUB) enzymes contain around... Read more

Technology

view channel
Image: The HIV-1 self-testing chip will be capable of selectively detecting HIV in whole blood samples (Photo courtesy of Shutterstock)

Disposable Microchip Technology Could Selectively Detect HIV in Whole Blood Samples

As of the end of 2023, approximately 40 million people globally were living with HIV, and around 630,000 individuals died from AIDS-related illnesses that same year. Despite a substantial decline in deaths... Read more

Industry

view channel
Image: The collaboration aims to leverage Oxford Nanopore\'s sequencing platform and Cepheid\'s GeneXpert system to advance the field of sequencing for infectious diseases (Photo courtesy of Cepheid)

Cepheid and Oxford Nanopore Technologies Partner on Advancing Automated Sequencing-Based Solutions

Cepheid (Sunnyvale, CA, USA), a leading molecular diagnostics company, and Oxford Nanopore Technologies (Oxford, UK), the company behind a new generation of sequencing-based molecular analysis technologies,... Read more
Copyright © 2000-2025 Globetech Media. All rights reserved.