Using liquid biopsy technology to process blood samples, data from the OncoMRD test could allow clinicians to adapt cancer treatments to patients' needs and improve treatment outcomes.

Currently, there's typically a wait of weeks to months before we can fully assess the effectiveness of cancer treatment. However, with the OncoMRD test, we are able to sidestep prolonged, ineffective therapy and quickly pivot to alternatives, thus saving patients from needless side effects. This technique has the potential to shift cancer diagnostics, moving from a delayed single assessment to a more continuous surveillance and facilitating the delivery of personalized cancer treatment.

Today, clinicians use CT scans to see if a tumor shrank or grew, but only large changes in size are easily noticed. Tumor biopsies provide more exact information, but they can't be done frequently enough to get regular updates.

That's why many clinicians are turning to liquid biopsies, or tests that look for signs of cancer in the patient's blood, one of them is cell-free mRNA (cfmRNA) that tumors have shed. Blood samples can be collected frequently, but they are only useful when these tumor biomarkers are present in high enough levels for biomedical instruments to detect.

Lung cancer is a particular problem. Other FDA-approved tools for detecting cancer cells in blood samples have proven ineffective for monitoring lung cancer treatments—likely because they targeted a single protein on the cells' surfaces that is less common in lung cancers.

OncoDxRx is looking for more sensitive biomarkers of cancer that they could use to closely monitor treatments.

In some cases, only less than half of cancer patients respond to the treatments, leaving the rest with poor outcomes. Treatments may also be expensive and cause adverse reactions in some patients, so it's important for clinicians to know early and quickly on whether a treatment is going to be effective—or whether they may be better off with a different treatment.

The OncoMRD test developed by OncoDxRx's team, first demonstrated in 2023, succeeded where others fell short. It captures and analyzes cancer signals in the form of mRNA which exists in hundreds of copies compared to only 2 copies of DNA in a single cell.

The test profiles a wide array of cfmRNA expression patterns and establishes cancer type-specific biomarkers as well as patient-derived gene expression signature which is unique to each individual patient.

To test that OncoMRD could monitor lung cancer treatments, the team used it to collect cfmRNA from the blood of 6 patients receiving chemotherapy, immunotherapy or combination therapy. Their study revealed that when any biomarker of the OncoMRD panel in a patient's blood was detected, their cancer is more likely to persist after treatment.

The study also showed that samples collected from patients whose cancer did not respond to treatment had overactive genes that may have made the cancer resilient. These genes might be good targets for future cancer therapies.