Biomarker
Anything measurable in the body or tumour that tells you something useful: what kind of cancer it is, how it is likely to behave, or which drug is likely to work.
Biomarkers come in three main flavours: diagnostic (what is this?), prognostic (how will it behave regardless of treatment?) and predictive (will this particular treatment work?); ER, PD-L1, HER2, EGFR mutations and MSI are predictive biomarkers with drugs attached to them, PSA and CA-125 are tumour markers used for monitoring, and Ki-67 is prognostic. Predictive biomarkers underpin precision oncology, letting trials enrol only patients likely to benefit and sparing others a useless drug, and a test validated for this purpose becomes a companion diagnostic. Many biomarkers remain imperfect, PD-L1 most famously, and validating and standardising them is one of the field's chronic bottlenecks.
Pages like this
not linked directly; found by shared links- TermEarly detection
Shares Prognosis, Tumour marker, Circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA).
- CancerCancer of unknown primary (CUP)
Shares Immunohistochemistry (IHC), Tumour mutational burden (TMB), Microsatellite instability (MSI-H) / mismatch repair deficiency (dMMR), Histopathology & immunohistochemistry.
- ProductFoundationOne CDx / Liquid CDx
Shares Genomic profiling, Companion diagnostics, Comprehensive genomic profiling.
- IdeaRe-test the metastasis, not the old primary, before every change of treatment
Shares Immunohistochemistry (IHC), Histopathology & immunohistochemistry, Comprehensive genomic profiling.
- IdeaA reliance pathway for companion diagnostics so the test arrives with the drug
- TermPD-L1 expression testing (22C3, SP142, SP263)
Shares Tumour mutational burden (TMB), Companion diagnostics, Histopathology & immunohistochemistry.
- IdeaRecord how long tissue waited before fixation in every pathology report
Shares Immunohistochemistry (IHC), Histopathology & immunohistochemistry.
- IdeaDrug labels must state which biomarker assays were validated and how they compare