Hotspot Mutation Detection from Circulating Tumor DNA in Cancer Patients

In less than 200 words, what main research questions are you working on? Please make sure to first include a brief context and background to your research, articulate your question(s) and conclude with why you think it’s important to study the them (i.e., the potential broader impacts).

I examine circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) that is found in cancer patient blood samples. My role is to evaluate technologies that claim to be able to detect ctDNA that originate from apoptotic or necrotic circulating tumor cells in the peripheral blood of cancer patient. It is potentially an attractive source to gain biomarker information that would help with diagonosis and therapy implementation. This is also a way to avoid invasive tumor biopsies that can be painful and does not provide useful information for follow up treatment.