In the late 1990’s, Dr. Maurice Stroun first discovered that tumors continually shed their unique genomic material – the root cause of most cancers – into the bloodstream. Unfortunately, these telltale genomic “signals” are so weak that current genomic analysis technologies, including next-generation sequencing, can only detect such signals sporadically or in patients with terminally high tumor burden. The main reason for this is that such technologies are plagued by error rates and bias that can be orders of magnitude higher than what is required to reliably detect de novo genomic alterations associated with cancer.
Guardant Health has leveraged these same advances in digital communication to develop a genomic analysis technology architecture called Digital Sequencing. This architecture reduces the noise and distortion generated by next-generation sequencing to almost zero. Digital Sequencing enables ultra high-fidelity, single-molecule detection of actionable tumor-specific genomic alterations in cancer with unparalleled specificity and breadth. Put another way, clinicians using Guardant Health’s technology can now non-invasively see the genomic dimension of cancer throughout a patient.