New liquid biopsy technology set to transform cancer diagnostics
Original story from Elsevier (Amsterdam, Netherlands).
New Bridge Capture method offers advances for clinical testing, disease monitoring and treatment selection.
A novel liquid biopsy technology is set to advance cancer diagnostics and monitoring by overcoming the long-standing challenge of simultaneously achieving high sensitivity, broad coverage and simple workflow. A team of researchers from Genomill Health Inc., the University of Turku and the TYKS Turku University Hospital (all Turku, Finland) benchmarked this new method, Bridge Capture, against two market-leading tools. Their analysis, appearing in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, published by Elsevier, highlights the method’s simplicity, cost-efficiency, reproducibility and scalability, making it well suited for routine clinical testing, disease monitoring and treatment selection.
Cancer diagnostics are shifting from tissue to liquid biopsies. This minimally invasive approach is fast and can provide a comprehensive overview of tumor genetics. However, today’s liquid biopsies come with key performance challenges.
“Fast and sensitive tests usually cover only few variants that require prior information from a tissue biopsy. Other methods detect a wide range of variants, but require complex workflows, leading to long turnaround times, higher costs and greater risk of human error. As a result, clinics often need different assays for early detection, treatment selection or disease monitoring, compromising between sensitivity, speed and the number of variants they can investigate,” explained CEO of Genomill Health, Inc. Manu Tamminen.
To address this challenge, Bridge Capture, a targeted next-generation sequencing method, was developed. This study evaluated Bridge Capture using contrived colorectal cancer samples mimicking circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) across a wide range of variant allele frequencies. The performance of Bridge Capture was benchmarked against two leading commercial liquid-biopsy assays (Archer LIQUIDPlex and Illumina AmpliSeq CHPv2). Bridge Capture showed strong concordance with both assays while detecting the lowest variant allele frequency, demonstrating its superior sensitivity for rare ctDNA variants.
“The technology scales from compact hotspot panels to much larger content without changing the core workflow. That means one method can serve both today’s focused clinical assays and tomorrow’s broader panels,” noted Tamminen.
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Practical usability
The performance of Bridge Capture was also assessed for practical usability. Bridge Capture maintained near-identical results even when read depth was reduced ten-fold, supporting effective use of sequencing depth. Lead co-author Anttoni Korkiakoski, senior bioinformatics specialist and PhD candidate, Genomill Health Inc. and Department of Biology, University of Turku, points out, “Because Bridge Capture uses sequencing capacity very efficiently, you can get low variant allele frequency calls without the need for deep sequencing. That directly translates into lower per-sample cost and opens high-sensitivity testing to labs with limited sequencing budgets.”
Interlaboratory testing provided consistent results, and the results were reproducible between manual and automated workflows, showing robust reproducibility and applicability. As cancer testing is increasingly moving from large, centralized laboratories to smaller, decentralized sites, a simple, versatile workflow that performs efficiently on low- to mid-throughput instruments enables cost-effective liquid biopsy testing closer to the patient.
“Bridge Capture is built for the reality of clinical sequencing today: labs need sensitivity for rare variants, but they also need workflows that are simple, fast and cost-predictable. Our results show you don’t have to trade one for the other anymore,” noted inventor of the technology Juha-Pekka Pursiheimo, Genomill Health Inc.
Lead co-author Simona Adamusová, laboratory specialist and PhD candidate, Genomill Health Inc. and Department of Biology, University of Turku, added, “What mattered to us wasn’t just performance in our own hands – it was whether another lab could pick it up just like that and get a corresponding answer. The reproducibility data confirm this is the case.”
Tamminen concluded, “We were particularly impressed with how well Bridge Capture performed against established commercial technologies, especially its ability to detect very low variant allele frequencies. As the method scales to larger panels while keeping a simple workflow, we see strong potential for broader applications, including early cancer detection.”
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