Abstract 7489: Peripheral blood liquid biopsy for the screening of lung cancer

Abstract Lung cancer is the second most common type of cancer in both men and women and the leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Unfortunately, most patients have advanced stages (stage III or IV) at the time of diagnosis and the only U.S. Preventive Services Task Force-recommended screening test, Low Dose CT scan (LDCT), has a high false-positive rate. Therefore, there is an urgent need for the early detection of lung cancer with better discrimination between individuals with lung cancer and those without. In this study, we demonstrate the capability of a non-enrichment-based liquid biopsy workflow, the High Definition Single Cell Assay (HDSCA) to be used as a complementary tool to the current screening methodology. The HDSCA workflow can detect circulating cells of epithelial, mesenchymal, endothelial, and hematological origin, as well as acellular events such as oncosomes. This allows the investigation of the broad spectrum of circulating rare events for the potential identification of biomarkers associated with lung cancer. We investigated 52 peripheral blood samples collected from the second annual screening round of Manchester’s 'Lung Health Check' pilot of a community-based lung cancer screening cohort. Of these, 7 were subsequently diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer, 2 with small cell lung cancer, and 43 were deemed at high risk of developing lung cancer. We additionally investigated 60 peripheral blood samples from individuals with no known pathology to use as controls. Within the screening cohort, a number of single rare analytes were found to have statistically significant differences between the lung cancer, high-risk cohort, and normal blood donor samples, which can potentially be biomarkers used to differentiate the cohorts. We also built a multi-analyte patient-level classification model utilizing the rare cellular and acellular events that stratified lung cancer patients from the normal donor individuals and high-risk cohort with high accuracy. Our results demonstrate the potential of liquid biopsy as a complementary screening approach for lung cancer. Citation Format: Jiyoun Seo, Stephanie N. Shishido, Jeremy Mason, Carmen Ruiz Velasco, Andrew Chen, Dominic Rothwell, Phil Crosbie, James Hicks, Caroline Dive, Peter Kuhn. Peripheral blood liquid biopsy for the screening of lung cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts); 2024 Apr 5-10; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(6_Suppl):Abstract nr 7489.