NSCLC Heterogeneity in Early Stage Patients and Prediction of Relapse Using a Personalized "Liquid Biopsy"

Lung cancer is the most common cancer in the world. In operable early stage patients NSCLS can be curable, but even after complete primary tumor resection, about 45% of early stage patients develop local or distant recurrence within 8-18 months. Recent studies have established that targeted therapies may fail to cure the disease because of tumor heterogeneity. The presence of genetic heterogeneity in different portions of a tumor have demonstrated its importance in tumor biology suggesting that pre-existing genetically different sub clones may be selected by therapy or differentially involved in the metastatic process, leading to treatment failure. The relationship of tumor heterogeneity with the poor clinical outcome suggests that its assessment could provide interesting and useful clinical information, especially, in terms of prognosis and treatment selection. It is now, well established that during the evolution of tumor new cellular clones could be emerged which differ genetically from the molecular signature of tumor cells evaluated at the time of initial diagnosis. This molecular evolution may further contribute to the tumor heterogeneity during the disease progression. The evaluation of the real-time molecular tumor heterogeneity requires repeated re-biopsies during the different clinical phases of NSCLC which, however, are invasive and not, always, feasible. This problem can be by-passed by the use of tumor-originating elements in the plasma and among these cellular products the isolation and analysis of cell tumor DNA (ctDNA) and the characterization of Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) represent important tools for identification and monitoring of molecular tumor alterations in cancer patients, representing what the investigators call "liquid biopsy". ctDNA is originated from cellular necrosis due to increased tumoral cellular turnover and cellular ischemia as well as from apoptosis of tumor cells or lysis of Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs). On the other hand, the CTCs, which designate the cells circulating in the blood, can be detected in several tumor types, irrespectively of the clinical phase, and their detection has been correlated with disease progression and treatment resistance. Therefore, the concomitant analysis of both ctDNA and CTCs could permit to better evaluate the genetic heterogeneity of the tumor since they continuously released from tumor cells throughout the clinical course of the disease and is considered to be proportional to tumor burden and tumor progression at each time-point. This is a multicenter, single arm, non-randomized translational research study. Patients with operable NSCLC will be enrolled in the study. Patients' peripheral blood will be obtained before the surgical excision of the primary tumor as well as 1-month post-op and every 3-6 months thereafter until disease progression and upon disease relapse for the evaluation of ctDNA and CTCs. Different sites of the primary tumor as well as the regional involved lymph nodes and, in selected patients, biopsies from metastatic sites will be genotyped by NGS as well.