scholarly journals Liquid Biopsy: A New Diagnostic Strategy and Not Only for Lung Cancer?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefania Scarpino ◽  
Umberto Malapelle

Targeted molecular therapies have significantly improved the therapeutic management of advanced lung cancer. The possibility of detecting lung cancer at an early stage is surely an important event in order to improve patient survival. Liquid biopsy has recently demonstrated its clinical utility in advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) as a possible alternative to tissue biopsy for non-invasive evaluation of specific genomic alterations, thus providing prognostic and predictive information when the tissue is difficult to find or the material is not sufficient for the numerous investigations to be carried out. Several biosources from liquid biopsy, including free circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and RNA (ctRNA), circulating tumor cells (CTCs), exosomes and tumor-educated platelets (TEPs), have been extensively studied for their potential role in the diagnosis of lung cancer. This chapter proposes an overview of the circulating biomarkers assessed for the detention and monitoring of disease evolution with a particular focus on cell-free DNA, on the techniques developed to perform the evaluation and on the results of the most recent studies. The text will analyze in greater depth the liquid biopsy applied to the clinical practice of the management of NSCLC.

BMC Cancer ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Corriveau ◽  
Gregory R. Pond ◽  
Grace H. Tang ◽  
John R. Goffin

Abstract Background Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung cancer are associated diseases. COPD is underdiagnosed and thus undertreated, but there is limited data on COPD diagnosis in the setting of lung cancer. We assessed the diagnosis of COPD with lung cancer in a large public healthcare system. Methods Anonymous administrative data was acquired from ICES, which links demographics, hospital records, physician billing, and cancer registry data in Ontario, Canada. Individuals age 35 or older with COPD were identified through a validated, ICES-derived cohort and spirometry use was derived from physician billings. Statistical comparisons were made using Wilcoxon rank sum, Cochran-Armitage, and chi-square tests. Results From 2002 to 2014, 756,786 individuals were diagnosed with COPD, with a 2014 prevalence of 9.3%. Of these, 51.9% never underwent spirometry. During the same period, 105,304 individuals were diagnosed with lung cancer, among whom COPD was previously diagnosed in 34.9%. Having COPD prior to lung cancer was associated with lower income, a rural dwelling, a lower Charlson morbidity score, and less frequent stage IV disease (48 vs 54%, p < 0.001). Spirometry was more commonly undertaken in early stage disease (90.6% in stage I-II vs. 54.4% in stage III-IV). Conclusion Over a third of individuals with lung cancer had a prior diagnosis of COPD. Among individuals with advanced lung cancer, greater use of spirometry and diagnosis of COPD may help to mitigate respiratory symptoms.


Cancers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 2101
Author(s):  
Ângela Carvalho ◽  
Gabriela Ferreira ◽  
Duarte Seixas ◽  
Catarina Guimarães-Teixeira ◽  
Rui Henrique ◽  
...  

Despite the intensive efforts dedicated to cancer diagnosis and treatment, lung cancer (LCa) remains the leading cause of cancer-related mortality, worldwide. The poor survival rate among lung cancer patients commonly results from diagnosis at late-stage, limitations in characterizing tumor heterogeneity and the lack of non-invasive tools for detection of residual disease and early recurrence. Henceforth, research on liquid biopsies has been increasingly devoted to overcoming these major limitations and improving management of LCa patients. Liquid biopsy is an emerging field that has evolved significantly in recent years due its minimally invasive nature and potential to assess various disease biomarkers. Several strategies for characterization of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) have been developed. With the aim of standardizing diagnostic and follow-up practices, microfluidic devices have been introduced to improve biomarkers isolation efficiency and specificity. Nonetheless, implementation of lab-on-a-chip platforms in clinical practice may face some challenges, considering its recent application to liquid biopsies. In this review, recent advances and strategies for the use of liquid biopsies in LCa management are discussed, focusing on high-throughput microfluidic devices applied for CTCs and ctDNA isolation and detection, current clinical validation studies and potential clinical utility.


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (15_suppl) ◽  
pp. e15031-e15031
Author(s):  
Mi Young Choi ◽  
Da Hye Moon ◽  
Jong-min Jo ◽  
Hae Ung Lee ◽  
Seri Park ◽  
...  

e15031 Background: Stage IV lung cancer is the most advanced lung cancer state accompanied by metastasized to the area around the lungs or distant major organs. The most common type of lung cancer is non-small cell lung cancer, which is more aggressive and may spread quickly due to organ-specific complex networks such as lymph and major blood vessels. Thus, only precise diagnostic strategy approaches will determine the effectiveness of the actual and successful clinical treatment. Until a recent date, Immunohistochemistry (IHC) for programmed death-ligand 1(PD-L1) test is the only available biomarker test that purpose diagnostics (CDx) and guide the treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors in NSCLC. Methods: Given that CDx strategy, tissue biopsy has inevitable limitations, including patient risk, repetitive examination, sample preparation, sensitivity, and accuracy. For this reason, our research team contrived the best strategy for biomarker, PD-L1-specific CTCs in stage IV NSCLC group (N = 30) compared to pulmonary inflammatory patient groups (N = 30) CytoGen Smart biopsy platform. Herein, we removed false-positive cells for the first strategy of distinguishing between lymphoid/myeloid cells and the enriched-CTCs. And the second strategic approach is to calculate the pure CTCs (without false-positive cells) and then CTPS) as measured by the PD-L1 expression among pure-CTCs. That application is the percentage of viable CTCs showing partial or complete stained cells at the deducted cut-off value in each fluorescence, respectively. Results: Consequently, we demonstrated over 80% of the concordance rate between VENTANA PD-L1(SP263) and DAKO PD-L1(SP263) assay tested by the PD-L1 expression on stage IV NSCLC in tissue and pure-CTCs based CTPS from the blood. In contrast, pure-CTCs based CTPS in the pulmonary inflammatory group were all negative (recorded as zero). Conclusions: Conclusively, this study implicates that pure-CTCs based CTPS could be deployed for innovative diagnosis strategies as alternatives for tissue biopsy. Our clinical study's data suggested that the possibility for prompt decision for diagnosis and gain powerful insights to guide the personalized treatment in NSCLCs. Clinical trial information: 2020-0553.


Author(s):  
Annarita Perillo ◽  
Mohamed Vincenzo Agbaje Olufemi ◽  
Jacopo De Robbio ◽  
Rossella Margherita Mancuso ◽  
Anna Roscigno ◽  
...  

Lung cancer is the most common cancer and the leading cause of cancer mortality worldwide. To date, tissue biopsy has been the gold standard for the diagnosis and the identification of specific molecular mutations, to guide choice of therapy. However, this procedure has several limitations. Liquid biopsy could represent a solution to the intrinsic limits of traditional biopsy. It can detect cancer markers such as circulating tumor DNA or RNA (ctDNA, ctRNA), and circulating tumor cells, in plasma, serum or other biological fluids. This procedure is minimally invasive, reproducible and can be used repeatedly. The main clinical applications of liquid biopsy in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients are the early diagnosis, stratification of the risk of relapse, identification of mutations to guide application of targeted therapy and the evaluation of the minimum residual disease. In this review, the current role of liquid biopsy and associated markers in the management of NSCLC patients was analyzed, with emphasis on ctDNA and CTCs, and radiotherapy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jinglun Liang ◽  
Guoliang Ye ◽  
Jianwen Guo ◽  
Qifan Huang ◽  
Shaohui Zhang

Malignant pulmonary nodules are one of the main manifestations of lung cancer in early CT image screening. Since lung cancer may have no early obvious symptoms, it is important to develop a computer-aided detection (CAD) system to assist doctors to detect the malignant pulmonary nodules in the early stage of lung cancer CT diagnosis. Due to the recent successful applications of deep learning in image processing, more and more researchers have been trying to apply it to the diagnosis of pulmonary nodules. However, due to the ratio of nodules and non-nodules samples used in the training and testing datasets usually being different from the practical ratio of lung cancer, the CAD classification systems may easily produce higher false-positives while using this imbalanced dataset. This work introduces a filtering step to remove the irrelevant images from the dataset, and the results show that the false-positives can be reduced and the accuracy can be above 98%. There are two steps in nodule detection. Firstly, the images with pulmonary nodules are screened from the whole lung CT images of the patients. Secondly, the exact locations of pulmonary nodules will be detected using Faster R-CNN. Final results show that this method can effectively detect the pulmonary nodules in the CT images and hence potentially assist doctors in the early diagnosis of lung cancer.


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