Clinical Validity of Circulating Tumor DNA As Prognostic and Predictive Marker for Personalized Colorectal Cancer Patient Management

Overview

Journal Cancers (Basel)

Publisher MDPI

Specialty Oncology

Date 2022 Feb 15

PMID 35159118

Authors

Ariane Hallermayr

Verena Steinke-Lange

Holger Vogelsang

Markus Rentsch

Maike de Wit

Christopher Haberl

Elke Holinski-Feder

Julia M A Pickl

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) is a promising liquid biopsy (LB) marker to support clinical decisions in precision medicine. For implementation into routine clinical practice, clinicians need precise ctDNA level cutoffs for reporting residual disease and monitoring tumor burden changes during therapy. We clinically validated the limit of blank (LOB) and the limit of quantification (LOQ) of assays for the clinically most relevant somatic variants p.V600E and p.G12/p.G13 in colorectal cancer (CRC) in a study cohort encompassing a total of 212 plasma samples. We prove that residual disease detection using the LOB as a clinically verified cutoff for ctDNA positivity is in concordance with clinical evidence of metastasis or recurrence. We further show that tumor burden changes during chemotherapy and the course of disease are correctly predicted using the LOQ as a cutoff for quantitative ctDNA changes. The high potential of LB using ctDNA for accurately predicting the course of disease was proven by direct comparison to the routinely used carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) as well as the circulating free DNA (cfDNA) concentration. Our results show that LB using validated ctDNA assays outperforms CEA and cfDNA for residual disease detection and the prediction of tumor burden changes.

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