{"entity":{"id":"paper-rothwell-nat-med","kind":"paper","name":"Utility of ctDNA to support patient selection for early phase clinical trials: the TARGET study","aka":[],"tldr":"Paper cited by one trial page, indexed on Europe PMC as PubMed record 31011204 and published in Nature Medicine; the citing page links this DOI, which is how the record was matched.","summary":"Next-generation sequencing (NGS) of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) supports blood-based genomic profiling but is not yet routinely implemented in the setting of a phase I trials clinic. TARGET is a molecular profiling program with the primary aim to match patients with a broad range of advanced cancers to early phase clinical trials on the basis of analysis of both somatic mutations and copy number alterations (CNA) across a 641 cancer-associated-gene panel in a single ctDNA assay. For the first 100 TARGET patients, ctDNA data showed good concordance with matched tumor and results were turned round within a clinically acceptable timeframe for Molecular Tumor Board (MTB) review. When a 2.5% variant allele frequency (VAF) threshold was applied, actionable mutations were identified in 41 of 100 patients, and 11 of these patients received a matched therapy. These data support the application of ctDNA in this early phase trial setting where broad genomic profiling of contemporaneous tumor material enhances patient stratification to novel therapies and provides a practical template for bringing routinely applied blood-based analyses to the clinic.\n\nIndexed on Europe PMC as PubMed record 31011204 (DOI 10.1038/s41591-019-0380-z). Matched by DOI alone: one trial page cites this DOI among its external links (the pages are listed under Related), and this page was written so that the citation resolves inside OnCo. No figure has been checked by an editor.","asOf":"2026-09-22","links":[{"label":"Nat Med 2019","url":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-019-0380-z"},{"label":"PubMed","url":"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31011204/"},{"label":"Europe PMC","url":"https://europepmc.org/article/MED/31011204"}],"tags":["europepmc-ingest"],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":["target-national"],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":[],"journals":["nature-medicine"],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"journal":"Nature Medicine","year":2019,"doi":"10.1038/s41591-019-0380-z","pmid":"31011204","authors":"Rothwell DG, Ayub M, Cook N, et al.","paperType":"observational","findings":[],"whatItMeans":"One trial page on OnCo cites this paper by its DOI; this record gives the citation a page of its own so a reader can follow it without leaving OnCo. Read the abstract above alongside the citing page listed under Related; the record was created automatically from the Europe PMC entry and its figures have not been checked by hand.","caveats":["Matched to the citing OnCo records by DOI alone; the summary reproduces the Europe PMC abstract and no figure has been verified against the full paper."]},"route":"/key-papers/paper-rothwell-nat-med/","neighbours":{"trial":[{"id":"target-national","kind":"trial","name":"TARGET National","route":"/trials/target-national/"}],"journal":[{"id":"nature-medicine","kind":"journal","name":"Nature Medicine","route":"/journals/nature-medicine/"}]}}