Question: You said in your “My Work” section that you analyse plasma to try and find lDNA linked to cancer-you probably get this question a lot- but do you commonly find links or are you slowly making progress (which isn’t a bad thing)?

Matthew Beaney answered on 5 Mar 2018:

Great question! We look at plasma from breast cancer patients in an “early setting” meaning early stage, non-spread cancer and an “advanced setting” where the patient has had cancer for a while. In an early setting breast cancer mutations are hard to find – we have to analyse cancer tissue to narrow down what mutations to look for in the patient’s plasma. But once we find one in the tissue we can always find it in the plasma. In the advanced setting we can always find the mutations in the plasma straight away.