Lightning does strike twice: leveraging phased variants to enhance minimal residual disease detection

Liquid biopsy detection of residual cancer after therapy offers to transform oncology care. Nonetheless, in the residual cancer context, signals are sparse and are hindered by technical sequencing noise. Kurtz et al.¹ introduce phased variant enrichment and detection sequencing (phasED-seq) to increase the circulating tumor DNA signal-to-noise ratio and detect minimal residual disease with unprecedented sensitivity.