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Take lessons from cancer evolution to the clinic

The first long-term study of how lung cancer evolves is revealing that therapies targeting multiple proteins in tumour cells could help to outpace the disease.
  1. Charles Swanton

    1. Charles Swanton is chief investigator of the Cancer Research UK TRACERx clinical study, and group leader of the Cancer Evolution and Genome Instability Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute and UCL Cancer Institute, London.

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How non-small-cell lung cancer evolves in individual patients is being studied in a project called TRACERx (Tracking Cancer Evolution through Therapy), the first such large-scale, longitudinal study to do so. Insights from the project so far are compiled this week in a collection in Nature. Started in 2014, the project aims to follow 840 people being treated at 14 UK National Health Service hospitals, from diagnosis through to cure or relapse and, tragically, death (see go.nature.com/2vkxwdy). Some tantalizing results have begun to emerge. These help to explain why early diagnosis is so crucial for effective treatment, as clinicians have noted for decades.

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Nature 581, 382-383 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01347-z

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Competing Interests

C.S. is a Royal Society Napier Professor and receives grant support from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, BMS, Roche-Venetana, Boehringer-Ingelheim and Ono Pharmaceutical. C.S. has consulted for Pfizer, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, MSD, BMS, Celgene, AstraZeneca, Illumina, Genentech, Roche-Ventana, GRAIL, Medicxi and the Sarah Cannon Research Institute. C.S. is a shareholder of Apogen Biotechnologies, Epic Bioscience and GRAIL, and has stock options in and is co-founder of Achilles Therapeutics, which is assessing the role of T cells targeting multiple trunk mutations in cancer cells. C.S. is co-inventor on a patent in that area (PCT/EP2016/059401). In relation to this article, C.S. holds a patent entitled ‘Method of detecting tumour recurrence’ (PCT/GB2017/053289) on assay technology to detect residual tumour DNA in blood, developed in collaboration with Natera, and has received funding support for MRD assay development from Natera and ArcherDx.

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