Back to Beyond the Research Lab
  • Therapeutics

A Simple Blood Test Provides Actionable Insights to Guide Cancer Treatment

A blood test platform can reveal key tumor characteristics from a simple blood draw—paving the way for more precise and less invasive cancer care.  

A blood test platform developed at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute can reveal crucial details about tumors—all from a simple blood draw. By measuring gene expression levels, the test will likely enhance precision medicine by providing information that could guide medicines such as antibody–drug conjugates, T-cell engagers, and radioligand therapies. These insights reach beyond what today’s genomic tests can uncover. 

The innovation was spearheaded by Matthew Freedman, MD, the David Goldstein Chair at Dana-Farber, who collaborated with Toni Choueiri, MD, Director of the Lank Center for Genitourinary Oncology, and Sylvan Baca, MD, PhD, a medical oncologist and computational biologist.  
 
“While the three of us are clinicians trained in oncology, we each bring complementary expertise—Toni’s primarily clinical, mine is lab-based, and Sylvan’s is in computational biology,” says Freedman. “Together, those perspectives helped us create this new platform.” 

Rethinking the Traditional Biopsy 

For decades, tissue biopsies have been the “gold standard” for diagnosing and studying cancer. Yet they can be painful, difficult to repeat, and provide only a snapshot of one portion of a tumor. Because tumors change over time, clinicians need a less invasive way to monitor those changes and tailor treatments accordingly.   

The challenges with tissue biopsies led us to explore the potential of liquid biopsies to see if we could unlock meaningful tumor-related information from a blood sample.

Matthew Freedman, MD

“The challenges with tissue biopsies led us to explore the potential of liquid biopsies to see if we could unlock meaningful tumor-related information from a blood sample,” Freedman explains. In fact, he and his colleagues discovered that the level of information provided from a small (1ml) plasma sample, when “read” using a unique combination of molecular biology and machine learning, provided similar levels of detail as a conventional tumor tissue biopsy.   
  

“Our test is also useful when a patient has advanced disease. Tissue biopsies sample one part of a single tumor, so if a patient has multiple tumors, they cannot be detected by tissue biopsies. Most tumors, however, are shedding their contents into the bloodstream. This means that if there are five tumors, more than one may be shedding some info into the bloodstream, so a blood draw may provide a more comprehensive picture,” he adds.  

Reading Cancer’s Epigenetic “Tags” 

Freedman and his colleagues created an epigenomic liquid biopsy platform. The term epigenomic refers to chemical modifications—or “tags”—that attach to DNA and influence which genes are turned on or off. 

By analyzing these DNA fragments shed by tumor cells into the bloodstream, the test can identify patterns that indicate the presence of cancer and how it behaves at a molecular level. Because these patterns reflect which genes are active, they may help predict how a patient will respond to treatment or whether a tumor is becoming resistant to a drug. 

Proof in Clinical Studies 

A 2023 Nature Medicine study conducted by Freedman and his colleagues, “Liquid biopsy epigenetic profiling for cancer subtyping,” tested the method in 433 patients across 15 different tumor types and confirmed that the approach could accurately classify cancer subtypes. 

In a 2024 Clinical Cancer Research paper, Freedman’s team applied the technique to lung cancer, demonstrating that it could detect molecular changes associated with treatment resistance—an insight that is difficult to obtain through standard biopsies. 

These findings point to broad potential for improving how clinicians track and personalize cancer therapy over time. The work has been supported by Dana-Farber, the National Cancer Institute, and the U.S. Department of Defense. 

Translating Discovery into Practice 

To accelerate the technology development towards the clinic, Precede Biosciences licensed the technology from Dana-Farber.  The company recently closed a Series B round to support efforts to refine and scale the approach, and it’s partnering with pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers to expand its applications in precision oncology.  

The name Precede comes from the idea of profiling the epigenomic controls that “precede” gene activity. At the 2024 American Society of Clinical Oncology’s 2024 annual meeting, Precede presented data highlighting how the platform can classify HER2 status, a key biomarker used to guide cancer treatment decisions. 

“Precede’s goal is to build on Dana-Farber’s pioneering work and scale the platform to enable broader access—something that’s difficult to achieve within academia,” says Rehan Verjee, CEO of Precede Bio. “Our aim is to accelerate the development and use of truly precision-guided medicines in practice.” 

Team Members