Liquid biopsy to understand blood cancer evolution

DR PAUL YEH
Haematologist and PhD student,
Cancer Epigenetics Lab & Molecular Biomarkers & Translational Genomics Lab
UMCCR and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre

Blood is the key: Minimally-invasive genomic testing to monitor pre-cancerous and cancerous blood conditions.

The key to improving patient outcomes in blood cancer centres around a greater understanding on how they evolve under therapeutic pressure or from pre-malignant conditions.  Such information is vital in developing strategies to screen, prevent and treat these conditions. Recent advances in genomic sequencing have significantly increased our ability to capture genetic information from patients to understand tumour evolution and heterogeneity. However, obtaining adequate and representative tissue for such analysis is often challenging and unfeasible due to the invasive nature of tissue biopsy.

This seminar highlights Dr Yeh’s work on capturing genomic information from a minimally invasive liquid biopsy to provide insights into blood cancers. These include the use of circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) from plasma as a disease monitoring tool in haematologic malignancy. Additionally, he presents work using blood testing to provide novel understandings of the pre-malignant blood condition, clonal haematopoiesis.

Dr Paul Yeh is a clinician-scientist in the Molecular Biomarkers and Translational Genomics Laboratory and the Cancer Epigenetics Laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. He completed his PhD in molecular biomarkers in 2018 through the University of Melbourne. Dr Yeh’s research focus utilises novel sequencing techniques to understand the molecular pathogenesis and evolution from pre-malignant clonal haematopoiesis to haematological malignancy. He is a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia.