Original story from Elsevier (Amsterdam, Netherlands). New Bridge Capture method offers advances for clinical testing, disease monitoring and treatment selection. A novel liquid biopsy technology is set to advance cancer diagnostics and monitoring by overcoming the long-standing challenge of simultaneously achieving high sensitivity, broad coverage and simple workflow. A team of researchers from Genomill Health Inc., the University of Turku and the TYKS Turku University Hospital (all Turku, Finland) benchmarked this new method, Bridge Capture, against two market-leading tools. Their analysis, appearing in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, published by Elsevier, highlights the method’s simplicity, cost-efficiency, reproducibility and scalability, making it well suited for routine clinical testing, disease monitoring and treatment selection. Cancer diagnostics are shifting from tissue to liquid biopsies. This minimally invasive approach is fast and can provide a comprehensive overview of tumor genetics. However, today’s liquid biopsies come with key performance challenges. “Fast and sensitive tests usually cover only few variants that require prior information from a tissue biopsy. Other methods detect a wide range of variants, but require complex workflows, leading to long turnaround times, higher costs and greater risk of human error. As a result, clinics often need different assays for early detection, treatment selection or disease monitoring, compromising between sensitivity, speed and the number of variants they can investigate,” explained CEO of Genomill Health, Inc. Manu Tamminen. To address this challenge, Bridge Capture, a targeted next-generation sequencing method, was developed. This study evaluated Bridge Capture using contrived colorectal cancer samples mimicking circulating tumor DNA…
