Brainstorm during PriOMiC-OncoPoint 2023 leads to joint Nature Communications paper!

No consensus strategies exist for prognosticating metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC). CtDNA – based biomarker genotyping can be used to identify actionable somatic alterations, but is only reliable if the ctDNA% is high enough. When the ctDNA% is low, alternative testing modalities (e.g., archival tissue, fresh tissue biopsy, or germline-only) are recommended. There are currently no practical tools to estimate ctDNA% sufficiency for genotyping prior to blood draw, resulting in treatment delays as patients await potentially uninformative ctDNA genotyping results, and wasted resources in profiling samples with insufficient tumor material.

In a joint effort with the groups of Prof. Alex Wyatt (Canada) and Prof. Johan Lindberg (Sweden), Dr. Bram De Laere has tried to address this need by evaluating the relationship between ctDNA% and established clinical prognostic factors to develop a clinically-interpretable machine-learning tool that predicts whether a patient has sufficient ctDNA% for informative ctDNA genotyping. Their results affirm ctDNA% as an actionable tool for patient risk stratification and provide a practical framework for optimized biomarker testing.

Of note, the foundation of this successful collaboration and joined publication was laid during a brainstorming session at our PrIOMiC-OncoPoint meeting last year (May 2023). 

You can read the Nature Communications paper via this link.