Dr Semaan on Liquid Biopsy vs Tissue Biopsy for Detecting Sarcomatoid RCC

Karl Semaan, MD, MSc, postdoctoral research fellow, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, discusses the clinical advantages of liquid biopsy epigenomic profiling for detecting sarcomatoid renal cell carcinoma (RCC) compared with traditional tissue biopsy.
Semaan explains that sarcomatoid features in RCC are often heterogeneous and may not be uniformly present throughout the entirety of the primary tumor or its metastases, making isolated tissue biopsy samples a less accurate diagnostic tool for detecting these features. This heterogeneity poses a significant challenge, as sampling from a non-representative region of the tumor may miss the presence of sarcomatoid components, leading to an incomplete or inaccurate diagnosis, he notes.
At the 2024 Kidney Cancer Research Summit, Semaan and colleagues presented early findings on a liquid biopsy assay developed using chromatin immunoprecipitation and sequencing for H3K27ac. Findings indicated that the assay displayed an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.92 for classifying plasma samples, showing its potential to overcome the tumor heterogeneity that makes detecting sarcomatoid features difficult with other approaches