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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		Can liquid biopsies shed light on the evolution of tumors?
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:01
	Publish Date:		2016-03-30 00:00:00
	Description:		Can the mutations found in tumors help unravel the mystery of cancer? Researcher John Witte of the University of California, San Francisco is using liquid biopsies to pick up a tumor’s DNA circulating in a cancer patient’s bloodstream. "Tumors grow and they evolve. And to get a sense of the natural history of a tumor evolving, you’d have to take repeat biopsies and sequence that. But now with a liquid biopsy, you could go in and just draw blood every week, and sequence that, and see how things are changing with their tumor. So I think we’ll learn a lot more about…what drives cancer, the evolution of tumors." Collecting the right amount of this DNA from the bloodstream is still a challenge, but liquid biopsies have shown promise with pancreatic, ovarian, and colorectal cancers. "The next question is, well, if you’ve picked up the cancer, and you know what the mutations are, can that tell you, for example, whether or not someone should be treated immediately and how they should be treated?"
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