Dr. Polsky on the Unmet Need of Clinical Utility in Liquid Biopsy

David Polsky, MD, PhD, the Alfred W. Kopf, MD, Professor of Dermatologic Oncology, Ronald O. Perelman Department of Dermatology Professor, Department of Pathology, and director of the Pigmented Lesion Service, NYU Langone Health’s Perlmutter Cancer Center, discusses the unmet need of clinical utility in liquid biopsy.

There is a need for physicians to keep working on clinical utility studies and to find the appropriate setting for these tests, says Polsky. These tests also need to be performed in the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA)—certified laboratories because currently they are being performed within research laboratories in the United States. Additionally, these tests have to be moved to clinical laboratories where they are conducted with oversight for any blood test.

Once clinical utility is shown in a research study and the assays are being performed in CLIA certified laboratories then I could see them being adopted in melanoma, Polsky adds. There are commercial companies that are developing liquid biopsy but it is mostly in other tumors and it has not made it to the melanoma space yet, concludes Polsky.