# MinerVa Prime

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

## TL;DR

Genecast's personalised blood test for leftover cancer, used to follow patients with EGFR-mutated lung cancer after surgery in the EVIDENCE trial.

## Summary

MinerVa Prime is the personalised residual disease assay of Genecast Biotechnology of Wuxi. Its largest published use is the MRD analysis of the phase 3 EVIDENCE trial of adjuvant icotinib versus chemotherapy in resected stage II to IIIA EGFR-mutated non-small cell lung cancer (Zhou et al., Nature Communications 2026): 1,352 plasma samples from 175 patients. At the landmark it found residual disease in 35.8 per cent of stage III and 14.7 per cent of stage II patients, with a longitudinal positivity of 47.4 per cent; positivity was associated with shorter disease-free survival at the landmark (hazard ratio 4.44) and over follow-up (7.82), longitudinal negative predictive value was 91.3 per cent, and median lead time over clinical recurrence was 169 days.

## Fields

- Kind: Test
- Status: emerging
- Last checked: 2026-11-04
- Also known as: Genecast MinerVa Prime
- Tags: test; mrd
- Brand: MinerVa Prime
- Modality: Tumour-informed ctDNA minimal residual disease test (up to 52 variants plus a hotspot panel)
- Mechanism: Tumour whole-exome sequencing selects up to 52 patient-specific variants, read in plasma together with a fixed panel of more than 1,000 mutation hotspots.

## Notes

- Stated limit of detection, from the paper's full text: "Probit analysis determined the limit of detection (LoD) values of 0.0075%, 0.0042%, and 0.0024% for 5 ng, 10 ng, and 30 ng inputs, respectively, when tracking 50 variants per sample" (Zhou et al., Nature Communications 2026). That is 75, 42 and 24 parts per million.
- Results are reported as tumour genome equivalents per mL with a residual disease call; no clone attribution is reported.

## Sources

- Zhou et al., MRD in the EVIDENCE trial (Nature Communications 2026): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-76392-9

## Connected records

- drugs: [brPROPHET](https://onco.cc/drugs/brprophet/), [Icotinib](https://onco.cc/drugs/icotinib/)
- 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: [Genecast Biotechnology](https://onco.cc/companies/genecast/)
- 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: [Clinical utility of molecular residual disease detection in early-stage resected EGFR-mutated non-small cell lung cancer](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-zhou-minerva-prime-evidence-nat-commun-2026/)

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