Can circulating tumor DNA be used for direct and early stage

In the August 16th issue of Science Translational Medicine, Phallen et al propose a method for early cancer diagnosis by using circulating tumor DNA (1). One major advance of this paper includes optimized sequencing of cell-free/circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) without knowledge of tumor mutations. Evaluation of 200 patients with colorectal, breast, lung and ovarian cancer revealed mutations in ctDNA in approx. 60-70% of all patients, including stage 1 and stage 2 disease. If this data can be reproduced in asymptomatic individuals, they will likely have a major impact on early cancer detection and patient outcomes. In this commentary, we examine the feasibility of this approach for detecting small, asymptomatic tumors, based on previously published empirical data. Eleftherios P Diamandis ( ) Corresponding author: [email protected] : Conceptualization, Data Curation, Formal Analysis, Funding Acquisition, Project Administration, Resources, Author roles: Diamandis EP Supervision, Validation, Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Writing – Review & Editing; : Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Writing – Fiala C Review & Editing No competing interests were disclosed. Competing interests: Diamandis EP and Fiala C. How to cite this article: Can circulating tumor DNA be used for direct and early stage cancer detection? 2017, :2129 (doi: ) [version 1; referees: 1 approved] F1000Research 6 10.12688/f1000research.13440.1 © 2017 Diamandis EP and Fiala C. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Licence This work was funded by a grant to EPD from the Canadian Cancer Society (Grant #703873) Grant information: The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. 13 Dec 2017, :2129 (doi: ) First published: 6 10.12688/f1000research.13440.1 1-3