Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation for Childhood Cancer

In parallel to treatment options, there are emerging ways to diagnose and to potentially remove tumors in pediatric cancer patients.

• Advancements in surgical techniques for treating pediatric cancer patients will continue to progress into the future to provide better treatment options for pediatric cancer patients. These include minimally invasive surgical techniques and the enhanced use of robotics.²³⁰ Laparoscopy, a surgery performed with a tiny camera inserted through a small incision, is an increasingly safe and effective tool for diagnostics and biopsies.²³¹
• Liquid biopsies and circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) offer even less invasive methods to diagnose cancer in patients and to monitor how well treatments are working. Liquid biopsies consist of analyzing the blood and other fluids of a patient, looking for tumor specific markers as a mechanism of detection.²³² ctDNA is an example of a tumor specific marker that can be observed in liquid biopsies. ctDNA can be beneficial to monitor both in initial diagnosis and during treatment to observe the presence of a tumor and how well a tumor is responding to treatment, based on the levels of ctDNA that is present in the blood of a patient.²³³
• Next generation sequencing can also detect potential cancer-driving mutations before cancer develops. This type of approach is called predisposition detection where patients can undergo enhanced cancer surveillance to catch cancer early in high-risk patients.²³⁴