OICR’s Dr. Trevor Pugh is helping realize the enormous potential of blood tests for cancer.
Blood tests might be the future of cancer detection, and that future might be closer than you think.
OICR’s Dr. Trevor Pugh and his lab are behind several major publications over the past few months that describe innovations in blood-based tools to detect and monitor cancer.
Often called ‘liquid biopsies’, these tools measure tiny fragments of cancer DNA circulating in the bloodstream. The DNA fragments — known as cell-free DNA (cfDNA) or circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) — are often present in blood before a tumour shows up on a scan, so they can be a critical marker of cancer at its earliest stages. Liquid biopsy samples can also be collected with a simple blood draw, making testing easier on patients than traditional tissue biopsies.
Liquid biopsy is a priority area for OICR, as part of our emphasis on early detection, and we support ctDNA and cfDNA studies within the institute and across Ontario. During Pugh’s streak of papers in high-impact journals like Nature Cancer, Genome Medicine, Clinical Cancer Research, he collaborated across OICR and with colleagues at Princess Margaret and other leading Ontario institutions.
“The last year has seen an explosion of exciting cfDNA developments across all types of cancer and all manner of medical interventions,” says Pugh, who is Senior Investigator and Director of Genomics at OICR, Senior Scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre (University Health Network), and Professor of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. “Our string of papers alone covers 12 types of cancer treated with organ transplant, surgical resection, multiple immunotherapies, radiotherapy and more.”
The breadth of Pugh’s recent innovations underscores liquid biopsies’ diverse potential. There’s a blood test to detect liver cancer both before and after resection surgery, a tool to predict how head and neck cancers will respond to immunotherapy, blood-based monitoring of melanoma during treatment, and the groundbreaking CHARM2 clinical trial that is exploring blood tests to revolutionize cancer screening for high-risk populations
Pugh and colleagues across Canada also created a game-changing database of liquid biopsy samples that will drive new innovations for years to come.
“The challenge now is marshalling all of these exciting findings into a cohesive clinical laboratory strategy that can be implemented in our healthcare system,” Pugh says. “To do this, prospective clinical utility studies are needed to show how these findings hold up in practice and will improve patient outcomes.”
