The Lank Center for Genitourinary Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute presents a succinct summary of all the testicular cancer clinical updates you need to know from ASCO GU 2024.
Uh Well, thanks to folks for sticking around. Um It was an exciting time in testicular cancer this year. Um many, many um high impact posters, but uh for the presentation standpoint of things, they were really just um kind of one thing I think worth pointing out, which is um kind of minimally invasive uh ways of detecting uh either recurrence or uh MRD and testicular cancer. And so there were two studies, both that were seem seemingly funded by NEA um from two different groups. Uh Both were uh generally the same idea which is they collected CT they, they collected blood samples from patients that they could get. And then uh there was kind of a mix of clinical scenarios for each of these patients and they used the NEA bespoke tumor informed uh CTDN AAA to see if it could be detected in various different clinical contexts. And so the data um is actually fairly interesting. Um for the first study, I was thinking about whether CT DNA can be used as an MRD essay. So this is post orchiectomy for clinical stage one disease. Within the 1st 12 weeks, you can see that uh if a patient was CT DNA positive. They all occurred within one year. It was only four patients. Uh whereas the CT DNA negative uh patients did quite well. There were 17 of them. And then thinking about CT DNA as by the essay for monitoring post, any sort of therapy, whether it's chemo or rplnd, you see a similar uh sort of split with only three patients being CT DNA positive at any point, post therapy and those patients are all recurring fairly quickly. The second study uh did something similar except the first study was in a mix of seminoma and non seminoma. And the second study was all non seminoma. And the, the money graph here is on the right, which is CT DNA status as a surveillance post some sort of therapy in 11 patients. Uh The CT DNA positive group did poorly relative to the CT DNA negative group. So in conclusion, and to end this uh CT DNA assessment using a platform such as NARRA may predict for recurrence, which is interesting, I think for a mutation, quiet tumor. Uh but these cores are very small uh if validated in the future. These really may inform adjuvant therapy and localized disease. I think there are other circulating biomarkers that are a little more developed like my A 371 which will have a little more prospective validation in the next few years. But um it could be that multiple biomarkers are more helpful than just one. So stay tuned.