Liquid biopsy gives new method of diagnosing brain cancer

Malignant brain cancer is aggressive, and biopsies are invasive and painful, but now, some doctors have developed a new method of confirming a diagnosis: a liquid biopsy.

Brain cancer’s survival rate can be as low as 27%, so doctors are quick to cut into the tumor for a biopsy. But now, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine is doing something different to diagnose, drawing cerebrospinal fluid from the patient’s back and searching for abnormal chromosomes.

“If there’s a cancer growing in the brain, there is a high probability that it’s gonna shed material into the water that’s bathing it, goes down through your brain, into the spinal cord, at the base of the spine. The procedure typically lasts a few minutes,” said Dr. Chetan Bettegowda, Prof. of Neurosurgery at JHSM.

These chromosomal genetic misfires from the liquid biopsy are fed into an algorithm to identify cancerous and non-cancerous cells. So far, the success rate is high, and patients endure far less pain.

“One day, the goal is to be able to say for an individual that has a neurological problem, from a finding on a brain scan or an MRI scan, we would be able to do this minimally invasive test and say, ‘we think there’s a very high likelihood that there’s a cancerous process,'” Bettegowda said.

Then, treatment can begin.

This cerebrospinal analysis can also be used to evaluate the treatment and how the cancer is responding.

More clinical trials are planned for that objective.