@sbarnettARK Epigenomic biomarkers are becoming more established for #LiquidBiopsy and #CancerScreening, and we have seen the big players positioning themselves in this #epigenomics race recently.
Catching signs of #cancer early is crucially important to the disease management and survival rates, so the question is: how can we find out if there is something wrong going on early enough?
The first generation of high-throughput technologies was predicated on finding mutated (tumor) DNA in the individual's body (somatic), different from their (normal) DNA. Tumor/Normal (T/N) comparisons of the individual's samples, biopsies or ctDNA will indicate if there
are signs of cancer already underway. So why do we need #epigenomic profiling if we can do all this with the detection of mutations? Well, the argument is that if you can see sufficient mutated copies of DNA, cancer may already have progressed beyond the initial stages.
Then people asked the question: is there an earlier mark that we can detect for earlier stages of cancer before the Tumor/Normal mutations signal amps up? Here is where #epigenomics profiling took hold.