James Hadfield, Director ctDNA and Epigenomics Oncology Translational Medicine at AstraZeneca, shared on LinkedIn:
“What if ultra-sensitive cancer detection no longer needed a room-sized sequencer?
I’ve just published a new blog on my Substack exploring the enabling technologies that could fundamentally democratize MRD testing, moving it out of large centralised labs and into community oncology centres near patients.
In the post I cover:
- Biofidelity Enspyre: work led by Rita Zhou and Paul Labrousse in my team, presented at AACR 2026. They showed a 98% reduction in sequencing requirements that could bring ultra-sensitive MRD to a benchtop NextSeq.
- Twist Bioscience MRD Express: a 24-hour personalised panel turnaround that closes the TAT gap between tumour-informed and tumour-naive approaches.
- Syndex Bio: methylation-preserving PCR that sidesteps the destructive bisulfite conversion bottleneck.
- Amplifyer Bio an engineered in vivo priming agent delivering up to 100-fold increases in ctDNA recovery from a standard blood draw. I see this technology as somewhat analogous to a contrast agents for MRI, where the Gadolinium dramatically improves the detail of soft tissues and tumors, but this contrast agent for ctDNA boosts the signal we can detect using standard liquid biopsy techniques.
The question I leave open: if you stacked these technologies in a single workflow, would the sensitivity gains be additive or truly multiplicative?
Read the full post on Substack.”
Other articles about MRD testing on OncoDaily.