Daily Digest March 27, 2020 – BioDecoded

Radiologic screening of high-risk adults reduces lung-cancer-related mortality; however, a small minority of eligible individuals undergo such screening in the United States. The availability of blood-based tests could increase screening uptake. Here researchers introduce improvements to cancer personalized profiling by deep sequencing (CAPP-Seq), a method for the analysis of circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA), to better facilitate screening applications. They show that, although levels are very low in early-stage lung cancers, ctDNA is present prior to treatment in most patients and its presence is strongly prognostic. They develop and prospectively validate a machine-learning method termed'lung cancer likelihood in plasma' (Lung-CLiP), which can robustly discriminate early-stage lung cancer patients from risk-matched controls.