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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		How liquid biopsies may benefit future cancer diagnoses
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:02
	Publish Date:		2016-05-05 00:00:00
	Description:		Diagnosing cancers and detecting recurrences can be difficult when tumors are deeply embedded within a persons’ tissues. And even then, the cells within a tumor can be diverse. Researcher John Witte of the University of California, San Francisco says that liquid biopsies may offer a less invasive and more accurate technique to pick up this complexity, or the heterogeneity of tumors. "Certain places are very difficult to biopsy. The second issue is whether or not you actually get the particular cancer while you’re biopsying. Depending on the cancer, you can have different foci of the disease, so it kind of depends where you stick your needle, what you pick up." The blood tests will pick up tumor DNA floating in a person’s bloodstream. "Looking at cell-free DNA in the blood is also going to pick up kind of this heterogeneity of the cancer, because presumably the cells are coming out from all different parts of the tumor. But the hope is that you’ll be able to actually kind of reconstruct the tumor heterogeneity from the liquid biopsy."
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