Incidental discovery of acute myeloid leukemia during liquid biopsy of a lung cancer patient

Liquid biopsy is considered an alternative to standard next-generation sequencing (NGS) of solid tumor samples when biopsy tissue is inadequate for testing or when testing of a peripheral blood sample is preferred. A common assumption of liquid biopsies is that the NGS data obtained on circulating cell-free DNA is a high-fidelity reflection of what would be found by solid tumor testing. Here, we describe a case that challenges this widely held assumption. A patient diagnosed with lung carcinoma showed pathogenic IDH1 and TP53 mutations by liquid biopsy NGS at an outside laboratory. Subsequent in-house NGS of a metastatic lymph node fine-needle aspiration (FNA) sample revealed two pathogenic EGFR mutations. Morphologic and immunophenotypic assessment of the patient's blood sample identified acute myeloid leukemia, with in-house NGS confirming and identifying pathogenic IDH1, TP53, and BCOR mutations, respectively. This case, together with a few similar reports, demonstrates that caution is needed when interpreting liquid biopsy NGS results, especially if they are inconsistent with the presumptive diagnosis. Our case suggests that routine parallel sequencing of peripheral white blood cells would substantially increase the fidelity of the obtained liquid biopsy results.