Plasma Biomarkers as a Non-invasive Approach for Early Diagnosis of Lung Cancer

Lung cancer is the most common cancer with the highest morbidity and mortality in the world. Stagement is closely related to the 5 years of survival rate of patients. The postoperative 5-year survival rate is above 90% for stage ⅠA lung cancer patients, while the 5-year survival rate of stage IV lung cancer patients is less than 5%. Therefore, early screening and diagnosis for lung cancer is a key method to reduce lung cancer mortality and prolong survival for patients.

At present, low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) is the most effective method for early detection of lung cancer. In addition to imaging examination, plasma tumor markers detection is also a common clinical detection method for tumor screening and postoperative monitoring.

Liquid biopsy is a non-invasive or minimally invasive method for testing blood or other liquid samples to analyze tumor-related markers including nucleic acids and proteins. Several studies have explored the detection of hot spot gene mutations, methylation and methylation changes of DNA, protein markers and autoantibodies in peripheral blood in lung cancer patients. Liquid biopsy has generally become the most popular field for early diagnosis of lung cancer.

Based above, it is necessary to combine multi-omics methods to improve the detection of early stage lung cancer. In our study, we intend to integrate molecular features obtained through liquid biopsy and clinical data of lung cancer patients, and develop and prospectively validate a machine-learning method which can robustly discriminate early-stage lung cancer patients from controls.