Guardant won’t completely eliminate tissue biopsy because liquid biopsy is not 100% accurate. Tissue Biopsy will pick up some things that liquid biopsy misses and vice versa.
Guardant’s aim is to make liquid biopsy to be used first because the results come back faster. If liquid biopsy shows a indication, then the oncologist can choose the best therapy for the biomarker. If liquid biopsy is negative, then the second step is tissue biopsy.
This was explained in the Q&A section of the last conference call:
Puneet Souda
Okay. Got it. Maybe, if I could touch on now data again and I know it’s been talked about, but if we saw the data, look, 17 samples had liquid, where liquid picked up versus the tissue, ahead of the tissue. But there were 12 samples, where there was tissue only detection. So, I just wanted to get a sense of how do you sort of position the test after that data and how – in terms of what data sets that you need beyond this in order to convince the oncologist longer-term, the liquid first paradigm is the way to go. Should we just expect that as when the final NILE data is completed for 300 plus patients or should there be more and more studies that here sort of convinced with the oncologists longer-term?
Derek Bertocci
Let me start with that and I’ll let others chime in. It’s a good question. In terms of – let me unpack that in terms of kind of multiple aspects of that question. So, the first is, neither testing modality is perfect, liquid misses some, tissue misses some as well. But what the NILE data shows is there’s a ideal sequence to how you position these tests. if we think about what we’re trying to establish, it’s a blood first paradigm, not a blood only paradigm. And so what we find is because of the shorter turnaround time, the ease of use and the completeness of our liquid solution by sequencing liquid ahead of tissue and refluxing the negative tested patients to tissue, you actually get more complete biomarker testing faster in first line non-small cell lung cancer.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4248280-guardant-healths-gh…
Starrob