Circulating tumor DNA clearance predicts prognosis across treatment regimen in a large real-world longitudinally monitored advanced non-small cell lung cancer cohort

BACKGROUND: Although growth advantage of certain clones would ultimately translate into a clinically visible disease progression, radiological imaging does not reflect clonal evolution at molecular level. Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), validated as a tool for mutation detection in lung cancer, could reflect dynamic molecular changes. We evaluated the utility of ctDNA as a predictive and a prognostic marker in disease monitoring of advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. METHODS: This is a multicenter prospective cohort study. We performed capture-based ultra-deep sequencing on longitudinal plasma samples utilizing a panel consisting of 168 NSCLC-related genes on 949 advanced NSCLC patients with driver mutations to monitor treatment responses and disease progression. The correlations between ctDNA and progression-free survival (PFS)/overall survival (OS) were performed on 248 patients undergoing various treatments with the minimum of 2 ctDNA tests. RESULTS: The results of this study revealed that higher ctDNA abundance (P=0.012) and mutation count (P=8.5×10(−4)) at baseline are associated with shorter OS. We also found that patients with ctDNA clearance, not just driver mutation clearance, at any point during the course of treatment were associated with longer PFS (P=2.2×10(−16), HR 0.28) and OS (P=4.5×10(−6), HR 0.19) regardless of type of treatment and evaluation schedule. CONCLUSIONS: This prospective real-world study shows that ctDNA clearance during treatment may serve as predictive and prognostic marker across a wide spectrum of treatment regimens.