Leading researcher

Assoc. prof. Deyan Dzhenkov, PhD

Cancer is a genetic disease in a sense that its occurrence, progression and response to treatment are all caused by somatic heritable genetic (and epigenetic) changes. Because of this in the last decades more and more genetic tests are implemented to establish the diagnosis, determine the prognosis and predict the effect of particular (targeted) treatment of cancer.  Usually these tests are performed on tumor biopsies which are obtained via invasive (usually surgical) procedure, which is not always possible, and in addition they do not convey information about distant metastases. Conversely, in recent years an approach so called liquid biopsy was conceived where tumor cells or small amounts of molecules shed by primary tumors and metastases in the bloodstream which is noninvasive and readily available. This approach, however, comes with its own challenges – the amount of tumor shed molecules is usually minute and is hard to detect. In addition, if the diagnosis is established in early stage, cancer is curable and disease do not recur. The LiquidBio team sets its goal to develop sensitive methods for early detection of cancer based on the noninvasive liquid biopsy approach.