The clinical characteristics and prognostic analysis of Chinese advanced NSCLC patients based on circulating tumor DNA sequencing.

Purpose: Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) is a noninvasive and real-time marker for tumor diagnosis, prognosis, and prediction. However, further investigations about ctDNA prognostic and predictive value are still needed, and conclusions from several studies were inconsistent.

Experimental design: We performed capture-based targeted ultradeep sequencing on liquid biopsies from a cohort of 34 advanced Chinese non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients and analyzed the clinical use of ctDNA in this study.

Results: On the basis of clinical characteristics of the 34 NSCLC patients, we found that brain metastasis correlated with shorter progression-free survival (PFS) and is more prone to happen in younger patients. After ctDNA sequencing, we analyzed the prognostic value of baseline ctDNA. In osimertinib-treated group, high max allelic fraction (maxAF) correlated with shorter PFS. But for the cohort of 34 patients, no correlation can be observed between maxAF and PFS. We also presented two cases to demonstrate the value of disease progression prediction by ctDNA, which can be detected earlier than clinical response.

Conclusion: In this study, we demonstrated that ctDNA is a prognostic marker for evaluating treatment response and predicting recurrence in advanced NSCLC. Further investigations with larger cohort and uniformed patient background are still needed to validate our findings.