Highlighting the Clinical Utility of Liquid Biopsies for Biomarker Detection in NSCLC

During the 2019 AACR Annual Meeting, Vassiliki Papadimitrakopoulou, MD, professor of medicine, Department of Thoracic/Head and Neck Medical Oncology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, discusses findings from theNoninvasive versus Invasive Lung Evaluation (NILE) studyand what they mean for the clinical utility of liquid biopsies for the detection of biomarkers in non—small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

NILE was a prospective multicenter noninferiority study that compared the utility of liquid biopsy using cell-free DNA (cfDNA) tumor profiling versus tumor tissue profiling. The study evaluated whether Guardant360—a 73-gene next-generation sequencing panel—can be used to detect all 7 guideline-recommended predictive biomarker mutations (EGFR, ALK, ROS1, BRAF, RET, MET, andERBB2) and 1 prognostic biomarker mutation (KRAS) at the same rate as traditional tissue genotyping tests in patients with newly diagnosed advanced NSCLC.

The main finding from the trial is that liquid biopsies are equally effective in detecting guideline-recommended biomarkers in the tumor at a significantly faster rate (9 days vs 15 days), says Papadimitrakopoulou. In a comparison of biomarker detection, the positive predictive value for the cfDNA analysis was 100% and the sensitivity was 80%.