# brPROPHET

Source: https://onco.cc/drugs/brprophet/  
OnCo record `brprophet` (Test). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Burning Rock's personalised blood test for leftover lung cancer after surgery, which tracks up to 50 of the tumour's own mutations.

## Summary

PROPHET (Patient-specific pROgnostic and Potential tHErapeutic marker Tracking) was described by Burning Rock Biotech and Chinese surgical groups in Cancer Cell in 2023: deep sequencing of 50 patient-specific variants, a stated limit of detection of 0.004 per cent, and 760 plasma samples from 181 prospectively enrolled patients with early-stage non-small cell lung cancer. It detected tumour DNA before surgery in 45 per cent of patients, outperformed fixed-panel assays for prognosis, and gave a median lead time of 299 days to radiologically confirmed recurrence. Of the variants it tracked, 98.2 per cent were not canonical driver mutations.

Burning Rock states in a press release of 25 August 2026 that its CanCatch Custom kit entered China's NMPA special review procedure for innovative medical devices; that is entry to review, not registration, and was not checked on the NMPA site.

## Fields

- Kind: Test
- Status: emerging
- Last checked: 2026-11-04
- Also known as: PROPHET; Burning Rock PROPHET; Patient-specific pROgnostic and Potential tHErapeutic marker Tracking
- Tags: test; mrd
- Brand: brPROPHET
- Modality: Tumour-informed ctDNA minimal residual disease test (up to 50 variants, hybrid capture)
- Mechanism: Whole-exome sequencing of tumour and white blood cells selects up to 50 patient-specific variants, which a personalised capture panel then reads deeply in plasma with molecular barcodes.

## Notes

- Stated limit of detection, in the abstract's words: "a limit of detection of 0.004%" (Chen et al., Cancer Cell 2023). The full text gives probit limits of 0.0036 per cent at 20 ng and 0.0018 per cent at 60 ng input, measured on a diluted cell line, which is 36 and 18 parts per million.
- Variant choice favours high allele fraction; the paper describes tracking trunk mutations shared by most tumour cells. It does not report which clone remains.

## Sources

- Chen et al., PROPHET in early-stage NSCLC (Cancer Cell 2023): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccell.2023.08.010
- Burning Rock: CanCatch Custom kit enters NMPA innovative device review (25 August 2026): https://www.brbiotech.com/details.php?class_id=105107103&id=550

## Connected records

- drugs: [Geneplus personalised MRD assay](https://onco.cc/drugs/geneplus-personalised-mrd/), [MinerVa Prime](https://onco.cc/drugs/minerva-prime/)
- cancers: [Non-small-cell lung cancer](https://onco.cc/cancers/nsclc/)
- technologies: [Liquid biopsy (ctDNA)](https://onco.cc/technologies/liquid-biopsy/), [MRD / molecular residual disease testing](https://onco.cc/technologies/mrd-testing/)
- companies: [Burning Rock Biotech](https://onco.cc/companies/burning-rock/)
- terms: [Circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA)](https://onco.cc/terms/ctdna/), [Minimal / molecular residual disease (MRD)](https://onco.cc/terms/mrd/), [Tumour-informed versus tumour-naive ctDNA assays](https://onco.cc/terms/tumour-informed-assay/)
- key papers: [Individualized tumor-informed circulating tumor DNA analysis for postoperative monitoring of non-small cell lung cancer](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-chen-prophet-nsclc-cancer-cell-2023/)

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