Susan London/MDedge News
Dr. David Graham
“This is an important first step towards an easier way to detect lung cancer at earlier and hopefully more curable stages,” agreed ASCO Expert David Graham, MD, who is also medical director at the Levine Cancer Institute in Charlotte, N.C. “If the promise of this report holds, we could easily see a day when a person could be screened for lung cancer and possibly other cancers simply by going into their regular doctor’s office for a blood draw.”
Study details
The CCGA study has enrolled more than 12,000 of its planned 15,000 participants (70% with cancer, 30% without) across 142 U.S. and Canadian sites.
The substudy reported had a development cohort (118 patients with lung cancer, 561 individuals without cancer) and a validation cohort (46 patients with lung cancer, 362 individuals without cancer), with the lung cancer and noncancer groups matched on age, race, and body mass index. “Having a comparable control cohort is very important in developing such a diagnostic for accurate analysis of the potential false-positive rate,” Dr. Oxnard noted.
Three prototype assays were tested: A targeted sequencing assay entailing very deep sequencing across 507 genes for somatic mutations such as single-nucleotide variants and small insertions and/or deletions; a novel, whole-genome sequencing assay to detect somatic gene copy number changes; and a novel, whole-genome methylation sequencing assay to detect abnormal epigenetic changes.