Blood, tumor samples point to risk of lung cancer recurrence

A trio of new papers outlines clues that clinicians could one day use to detect signs that a patient’s lung cancer has the potential to spread and grow resistant to treatments. The papers focused on how blood and tumor samples from 750 patients with lung cancer could be tested to monitor the effectiveness of treatments and gauge the risk of the tumor coming back. In them, the researchers describe how the prevalence of tumor cells in the blood and certain DNA patterns that persist in a tumor over time could be markers for recurrence, and how surveilling the body’s immune T cells can signal how well a therapy is working.