What techniques are used to monitor measurable residual disease and how accurate are the results?

What techniques are used to monitor measurable residual disease and how accurate are the results?

So there's a few different ways that we measure MRD. So first, if we think about when we look under the microscope and say that someone is in remission and that has a sensitivity about one out of 20 cells. So in other words, we can detect one out of 20 cells has leukemia. MRD is much more sensitive than that.

By most of the techniques that we have, we can determine whether someone has leukemia, one out of 1000 or even one out of 10,000 cells. And that's true for whether we're using what's called flow cytometry, which is to look at certain markers on the leukemia cells or whether that's using more DNA-based tests. One of them is called PCR, polymerase chain reaction. That looks for specific mutations or sometimes specific DNA fusions that are present in the leukemia cells.