Dialogues

Oct 2, 2024, 07:36

ASCO24 Updates: Xavier Bower on NorthStar Select: Liquid Biopsy Advancements for Cancer Treatment | OncoDaily

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting is one of the largest and most prestigious conferences in the field of oncology. This year, the meeting took place from May 31 to June 4 in Chicago, Illinois. The event gathers oncologists, researchers, and healthcare professionals from around the world to discuss the latest advancements in cancer research, treatment, and patient care. Keynote sessions, research presentations, and panel discussions are typically part of the agenda, providing attendees with valuable insights into emerging trends and innovations in oncology.

This year, OncoDaily was at ASCO 2024 for the first time covering the meeting on-site. We had the pleasure of interviewing researchers who summarized the highlights of their work.

In this video, Xavier Bower from BillionToOne discusses, shares insights on ‘Clinical validation of Northstar Select, a novel liquid biopsy assay for comprehensive genomic profiling of solid tumors.’

Cool, so I’m Xavier Bauer. I’m a scientist at Billion to One, and we’re a precision diagnostics company in Menlo Park, California, and I’ve actually been there for four years. I started straight out of undergrad, and what drew me to work in R&D at Billion to One was basically two strengths.

One being this patented QCT, molecular counting technology, that allows us to sort of address different applications in diagnostics, so the big ones being prenatal and oncology applications, and then the other strength being this patient-centered focus of the whole organization, so whenever we’re designing a test, you know, we’re trying to make sure that it’s as accurate as possible, as efficient as possible, and as broadly accessible as possible as well. So basically what we’re sharing in the abstract at ASCO this year is some clinical results from our North Star Select test.

So this is a treatment selection test, and it’s a liquid biopsy, so what that means is that we’re getting basically an oncologist orders a test, we get a blood sample from them, and we’re going to look at the circulating tumor DNA in that sample and try to find what mutations are present in the tumor, and what that allows us to do is say, okay, basically based on the mutations that you find, you’re eligible for certain treatments

And the results that we’re sharing at ASCO this year highlight the increased sensitivity of our assay, so basically we had a clinical trial where we enrolled about 200 patients, and we said whatever current liquid biopsy CGP test the physician is using, that’s great, but also let’s run our test at the exact same time, and when we compared the mutations that were found with each test, we saw that our increased sensitivity led to more SNVs, indels, CNVs, basically actionable, clinically actionable mutations found on the assay

So this addresses an unmet clinical need because there’s actually a really high proportion of patients that have tumors that don’t shed very much cell-free DNA, so basically an increased sensitivity test can provide actionable data for those patients to that you wouldn’t be able to pick up with other tests.

More videos and content from ASCO 2024 on OncoDaily.