Combinatory analysis of cell-free and circulating tumor cell DNAs provides more variants for cancer treatment

Background/Aim: Non-invasive biomarker detection using DNA from cell-free circulating DNA (cfDNA) and circulating tumor cells (ctcDNA) are emerging as they can be used for early diagnosis, prognosis and therapeutic target selection for cancer. However, cfDNA and ctcDNA from the same patient have not yet been compared extensively on how different the genetic characteristics of the two are in terms of the overlap between them. Materials and Methods: The performance of a customized NGS panel was used to compare the variants found in the 20 pairs of cfDNA and ctcDNA from gynecological cancer patients. Results: A genetic variant analysis revealed that there were only nine common overlapping variants out of 63 between the cfDNA and ctcDNA pairs, while 31 and 22 were unique to cfDNA and ctcDNA, respectively. Conclusion: A combinatory analysis of both cfDNA and CTCs from cancer patients can improve the sensitivity of liquid biopsies. These results are expected to provide better genetic target information for guiding clinical strategies for cancer.