Brief Report: Longitudinal tracking of ALKrearranged non-small cell lung cancer from plasma using circulating-tumor RNA and circulating-tumor DNA

While the administration of tyrosine-kinase inhibitors (TKIs) in ALKrearranged non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) has revolutionized precision medicine, detection of gene rearrangements from liquid biopsies remains challenging. RNA-based detection has demonstrated promising sensitivity for rearrangement detection and thus we hypothesize that a liquid biopsy assay analyzing circulating-tumor RNA (ctRNA) in addition to circulating-tumor DNA (ctDNA) will improve detection. Furthermore, we hypothesize that detection of gene fusions at baseline will correlate with clinical outcome.