cfTrack

Despite the rapid development of cancer treatments, a large fraction of patients experience recurrence, resistance, or progression of cancer during or after treatment. We developed a new non-invasive cancer monitoring approach, named cfTrack, based on the whole-exome sequencing (WES) of cell-free DNA (cfDNA). cfTrack provides the following advantages over the commonly used small-panel approaches:

• Comprehensive coverage of patients due to its whole exome coverage of diverse mutations.
• Ultra-sensitive early detection of Minimal Residual Disease (MRD) and recurrence at a very low tumor load, because cfTrack experimentally captures exome-wide tumor cfDNA and computationally integrates exome-wide tumor signals.
• Detection of tumor evolution and second primary cancer due to its exome coverage of mutations, even those not discovered in pre-treatment samples.
• One-size-fits-all without laborious development of a personalized assay.

Using both simulation data and a cohort of patients with cancer (n = 35, 18 prostate cancer, 8 lung cancer, 4 ovarian cancer, 3 glioma, 1 bladder cancer, and 1 germ cell cancer), we show that cfTrack achieves sensitive and specific monitoring of tumor MRD/recurrence and evolution.

For details, please refer to the full paper. Li S. et al., Clin Cancer Res (2022) 28 (9): 1841–1853.