Disseminated cancer cells detected by immunocytology in lymph nodes of <scp>NSCLC</scp> patients are highly prognostic and undergo parallel molecular evolution

In melanoma, immunocytology (IC) after sentinel lymph node disaggregation not only enables better quantification of disseminated cancer cells (DCCs) than routine histopathology (HP) but also provides a unique opportunity to detect, isolate, and analyse these earliest harbingers of metachronous metastasis. Here, we explored lymph node IC in non‐small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). For 122 NSCLC patients, 220 lymph nodes (LNs) were split in half and prepared for IC and HP. When both methods were compared, IC identified 22% positive patients as opposed to 4.5% by HP, revealing a much higher sensitivity of IC (p