The Great Cancer Test Experiment

A year ago I interviewed Deborah Fletcher, a 54-year-old manager at Deloitte who was fighting inflammatory breast cancer with all her professional skills. She carried a briefcase of spreadsheets, documenting treatments, bills, research, notes about who'd said what and what her plans were. Like many patients with advanced cancer, Fletcher eventually put her hopes in an experiment. In her case it wasn't a new drug but a new kind of test, called a liquid biopsy. The test scans a person's blood for small fragments of DNA released by tumors. The one she got, from Guardant Health, a California startup heavily financed by venture capitalists, looks for the DNA sequences of 68 well-known cancer genes and can reveal the mutations driving a person's cancer.©Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)Massachusetts Institute of Technology