Résumé
One of the most important medical innovations to arise from the genome revolution is the development of liquid biopsies: simple blood tests which replace the need for invasive sampling in fields as diverse as pregnancy, transplant medicine, infectious disease, and cancer. Virtually all of these liquid biopsies are based on a physiological phenomenon discovered in Strasbourg in 1948: circulating cell free nucleic acids. Despite more than a half century of research, this phenomenon did not have a clinical use until it was paired with high throughput sequencing and knowledge of the human genome sequence. I will describe how our lab developed a variety of diagnostic tests which have replaced invasive biopsies and are now used by millions of patients each year.
