Liquid Biopsy Predicts Esophageal Cancer Patient Response to Treatment

Creatv MicroTech, a privately-held biotechnology company has pioneered a blood test to predict treatment response in patients with newly diagnosed Stage I-III esophageal cancer (EC) treated with chemoradiation therapy (CRT). The results were published in the Journal of Translational Medicine. Creatv’s collaborator MD Anderson Cancer Center recruited patients for the study under standard of care CRT and IRB approved protocol. “We are delighted to present a method to stratify patients with EC who are responding to CRT using a single tube of blood,” said Dr. Cha-Mei Tang, CEO of Creatv. “Now, patients who are not responding to CRT can be identified quickly for alternative therapy.” Currently, no other blood test predicts treatment response for Stage I-III esophageal cancer therapies.

In the United States, 18,440 new cases are expected in 2020 for esophageal cancer, a disease that has the sixth highest cancer mortality rate. Even localized disease has a 5-year survival rate of less than 50%, making timely treatment decisions critical to patient outcome. The ability to monitor a patient’s response to therapy throughout treatment will allow for more precise adjustment to therapeutic regimes to optimize the management of the disease. In a completely novel concept, the test analyzes patients’ immune response to the presence of cancer, isolating cells from cancer sites that have migrated into the blood stream. Creatv demonstrated that a particular subtype of cell, Cancer Associated Macrophage-Like cells (CAMLs), tracks the patient’s response to therapy in real time. CAMLs are phagocytic myeloid cells that reveal the patient’s immunological response to active malignancy. CAMLs are not found in the blood of normal, healthy individuals.

Creatv has previously shown that in solid tumors, patients with CAMLs larger than 50 µm in size have a poorer prognosis, with shorter progression free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). In this paper, Creatv presents the findings from a two-year single blind prospective study of 32 esophageal cancer patients with Stage I-III treated with standard CRT. A CAML size of ≥50 µm in blood drawn immediately after the completion of CRT indicates a poor prognosis compared to patients with CAMLs < 50 µm, with a Hazard Ratio (HR) =12.0 for progression free survival (PFS) 95% CI 2.7-54.1, p=.004.