# Individualized tumor-informed circulating tumor DNA analysis for postoperative monitoring of non-small cell lung cancer

Source: https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-chen-prophet-nsclc-cancer-cell-2023/  
OnCo record `paper-chen-prophet-nsclc-cancer-cell-2023` (Key paper). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

A personalised blood test tracking 50 of each patient's tumour mutations found leftover lung cancer after surgery months before scans did.

## Summary

PROPHET deep-sequences 50 patient-specific variants to detect residual disease, with a limit of detection of 0.004 per cent. Applied with fixed-panel assays to 760 plasma samples from 181 prospectively enrolled patients with early-stage non-small cell lung cancer, it had higher sensitivity at baseline (45 per cent), outperformed fixed panels for prognosis and gave a median lead time of 299 days to radiologically confirmed recurrence. Non-canonical personalised variants made up 98.2 per cent of those tracked, with prognostic effects similar to canonical ones, and a proposed tumour-node-metastasis-blood classification outperformed TNM staging at the adjuvant decision point.

## Fields

- Kind: Key paper
- Last checked: 2026-11-04
- Journal: Cancer Cell
- Year: 2023
- DOI: 10.1016/j.ccell.2023.08.010
- Authors: Chen K, Yang F, Shen H, et al.
- Findings: Limit of detection 0.004%.; Baseline sensitivity 45%.; Median lead time 299 days to radiological recurrence.
- What it means: Personalised panels outperform fixed gene panels after lung cancer surgery, at limits in the tens of parts per million.
- Caveats: Company co-authored.; No clone attribution.

## Sources

- Chen et al., Cancer Cell 2023: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccell.2023.08.010
- PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37683638/

## Connected records

- cancers: [Non-small-cell lung cancer](https://onco.cc/cancers/nsclc/)
- fronts: [Diagnostics & Biomarkers](https://onco.cc/fronts/diagnostics/)
- technologies: [MRD / molecular residual disease testing](https://onco.cc/technologies/mrd-testing/)
- drugs: [brPROPHET](https://onco.cc/drugs/brprophet/)
- 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/)
- journals: [Cancer Cell](https://onco.cc/journals/cancer-cell/)

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