Healthy Living

How Minimal Residual Disease Assessment Emerged as an Important Tool for Blood Cancers

Final thoughts

While there are still countless questions to be answered about cancer, researchers have made enormous strides towards understanding the disease more thoroughly in recent years. The drop in cost for sequencing an individual’s DNA from three billion dollars to one thousand dollars is a great example of the positive movement that the medical community has taken. By combining improved technologies such as next-generation sequencing with an ever-growing body of knowledge about minimal residual disease in patients, physicians are increasingly able to offer more precise prognoses and more effective treatment methods to cancer patients, especially those suffering from forms of blood cancer like lymphoma that can be difficult to trace. In combination with growing biobanks around the world, it certainly seems like the medical community is on the verge of numerous invaluable discoveries about how cancer works at the molecular level. 

You can read more about MRD at Healio.com, and its potential applications for lymphoma at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.