China News Service, Guangzhou, May 18 (Cai Minjie, Zhang Lanxi, Jin Ting) One of the key points that lung cancer is difficult to cure is its extremely high recurrence and metastasis rate.
The research team of Guangdong Lung Cancer Research Institute announced on the 17th that finding residual lesions through blood testing can accurately predict the concept of recurrence.
For patients with early and mid-stage lung cancer, accurate identification of recurrence and non-recurrence patients after radical surgery or radiotherapy and chemotherapy is an important clinical issue.
The clinical research team led by Professor Wu Yilong, Life Director of Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital and Honorary Director of Guangdong Lung Cancer Research Institute, conducted blood tests on patients with early and mid-stage non-small cell lung cancer who received radical treatment to find out whether there is residual tumor molecular lesions ( MRD), which can accurately predict the probability of disease recurrence in patients.
The above research results have been published in the top journal "Cancer Discovery" in the field of malignant tumors under the title "Continuously Negative MRD Defines Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer May Be Cured".
Wu Yilong said that this discovery will change the treatment strategy of early and mid-stage lung cancer, that is, to avoid excessive treatment, and to carry out precise interventional treatment for high-risk groups of recurrence, which will improve the life and quality of life of patients.
Radical surgical resection and perioperative treatment are the current standard treatment modes for early and mid-stage lung cancer, but even so, 30% to 70% of patients face disease recurrence after surgery.
Drawing on the idea that MRD can predict the recurrence of leukemia and other blood patients in the field of hematology and tumor, Wu Yilong's team carried out high-level detection of peripheral blood to find molecular residual lesions or minimal residual lesions related to lung cancer. Negative means that the patient has no residual tumor or tumor. The load is very low, and the positive value means that there is still tumor in the body, and based on this, it can be predicted whether the patient will relapse.
In this study, the Guangdong Provincial Lung Cancer Research Institute team enrolled 261 patients with stage I-IIIA non-small cell lung cancer after radical surgical resection after 4 years. The MRD monitoring results were used to analyze the disease recurrence of the patients. For the first time, a potentially curable population after lung cancer surgery was defined.
"If the patient keeps the minimal residual tumor negative after surgery, there is only a 3.2% chance of recurrence and metastasis, and the risk of recurrence is extremely low, which can be considered as a potentially cured population." Wu Yilong said.
In addition, MRD can predict the efficacy of adjuvant therapy after surgery, and the negative population may not need adjuvant therapy.
"The analysis data confirms that the negative MRD means that there is no residual tumor in the patient's body, and this part of the population does not need to receive adjuvant therapy." Professor Zhou Qing, director of the Cancer Hospital of Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital, said that the results of this research will inevitably affect the follow-up precision adjuvant therapy decision-making Bring reminders.
Wu Yilong said that at present, MRD is a popular medical frontier field, and clinical research is also being carried out in the fields of bladder cancer, colorectal cancer and other high-incidence cancers, and certain results have been achieved.
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