Blood Biopsy

The Blood Biopsy Team is a multi-institutional, collaborative group focused on enabling routine monitoring of patients’ tumors directly from blood samples. The team is building tools and approaches to use blood biopsies to identify which treatments are right for patients, why some cancer cells respond to treatment and others don’t, and whether a patient has cancer that cannot be seen with imaging scans. The group aims to help make blood biopsies a revolutionary tool for treatment of patients with recurrent cancer and, perhaps someday, to learn how to prevent cancer recurrence in the first place.

The team includes scientists, engineers, oncologists, and computational biologists spanning numerous investigators and labs at the Broad Institute, MIT, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, and elsewhere.

While many blood biopsy technologies focus on detecting a predetermined set of genes or tumor mutations, the Blood Biopsy Team is developing methods for comprehensive, unbiased, and accurate genetic profiling of tumors from blood. These approaches are being implemented in the Broad Genomics Platform to enable large-scale research studies, both at Broad and throughout the wider scientific and clinical community.

Please contact viktor@broadinstitute.org concerning scientific and partnership opportunities, or genomics@broadinstitute.org concerning sequencing services in the Broad Genomics Platform.

Group leader: Viktor Adalsteinsson