Like ‘the size of a 747’ or ‘the length of a football pitch’, ‘curing cancer’ has become a part of our everyday lexicon. ‘A cure for cancer’ is a synonymous silver bullet - a metaphorical fix-all. But there’s a sting in the subtext: despite a global effort going back centuries, around eight million people are still killed by cancer every year. ‘Curing cancer’ is - literally or metaphorically - noble, aspirational and exhaustingly difficult.
Diagnosing cancer is not the problem, and hasn’t been for decades. We look, we cut, we biopsy, we test. The problem is that tumours not only grow, but mutate as they do so. Treating cancer isn’t like finding a needle in a haystack: it’s like reaching into a haystack and pulling the needle partway out, only to come back after lab tests to find the same needle has morphed into a scalpel. Matching a patient to the right course of treatment is difficult when the disease you’re trying to cure can transform itself in the time it takes to analyse a biopsied tissue sample.
Read more: Marcus Krause's lung cancer wouldn't stop growing. Then he took a new kind of blood test
At Guardant Health, Helmy Eltoukhy and his team are tackling this problem by cutting out the time-consuming, costly and invasive biopsy procedure altogether. All that their new method - a process of digital DNA sequencing the company calls Guardant360 - requires is two samples of a patient’s blood.
“Our liquid biopsy, Guardant360, is a blood test that can replace a repeat tissue biopsy, which for US lung cancer patients has a cost of more than $14,000,” Eltoukhy tells WIRED. “We can now find a single fragment of mutated tumour DNA out of a trillion others in a tube of blood. This is the result of improving the performance of our platform tenfold using continuous machine learning on the more than 30,000 patient samples we’ve sequenced.”
As tumours grow and mutate, cancerous cells die and slough off, shedding scraps of their DNA into the patient’s bloodstream. It’s these tiny traces of the larger tumour that Eltoukhy’s team are hunting, and the clues they leave to its structure will help oncologists in everything from prescribing appropriate treatment for late-stage cancer patients to detecting the warning signs of a tumour when it is still in its early stages and easiest to treat. Once a patient has been treated, the process can even be used to predict recurrence:
“With every major [iteration] of our technology, we will see a tenfold increase in population impact,” says Eltoukhy. “Our current test can help about eight million active cancer patients globally. Our [next] study will help the 80 million cancer survivors find peace of mind with recurrence detection. And the [subsequent] tests can potentially help anyone with an easy blood test for early cancer detection.”
What is your biggest pet peeve about the health industry and why?
The complexity and the resultant inefficiency inherent to many healthcare systems impedes progress in the industry. For some very good reasons, it is not enough to build, validate, and ship your technology as it is in tech. Building a successful healthcare product requires many separate steps involving hundreds of stakeholders to broadly bring change. Sometimes we wish things moved a little more quickly.
What will the health industry look like within 12-18 months?
Part of what we are doing with our technology is paving the way for a transformation from reactive, hypothesis-driven medicine to proactive, data-driven decision-making. As part of this transformation we have led the way in democratising access to the highest level of genomics in oncology by removing the inertial barriers of access to tissue and the need for an army of medical professionals as part of the process. Within the next year, we expect to start driving the same transformation for therapeutics development with GuardantOMNI, a 500-gene liquid biopsy that is ten times larger than Guardant360.
What are you most excited about at WIRED Health this year?
Intellectual curiosity is a key ingredient to overcoming fundamental challenges and accordingly, I’m excited to learn about all the ways that fellow scientists and entrepreneurs are transforming their respective areas in healthcare.
Want to know more? Helmy Eltoukhy is bringing Guardant360 to this year's WIRED Health conference in London. Join hundreds of healthcare, pharmaceutical and technology influencers and leaders at the fourth annual event on March 9 at 30 Euston Square. Buy tickets and learn more here.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
