Droplet Digital PCR as a Molecular Tool for the Detection of the EGFR T790M Mutation in NSCLC Patients with the EGFR Activating Mutations
Article Category: Original Article
Published Online: Mar 12, 2024
Page range: 21 - 26
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/bjmg-2023-0020
Keywords
© 2023 S Durgut et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.
Background
Almost 50% of NSCLC patients who initially show a successful response to tyrosine kinase inhibitors targeted therapy (TKI therapy) eventually develop acquired
Materials and methods
For this study, a total of 45 plasma samples from NSCLC patients with previously detected
Results
Of 45 tested plasma samples, a total of 14 samples were identified as positive for the T790M mutation. The same samples eventually showed the presence of T790M mutation in FFPE. Droplet digital PCR showed its great advantage in high sensitivity detection of rare allele variants. Our ddPCR assay detected T790M mutant allele in frequencies from 0.1%. The average number of droplets generated by ddPCR was 9571.
Conclusion
Monitoring of the T790M mutation has an important role in the examination of the effects of the prescribed TKI therapy. Since monitoring of potential changes during TKI therapy requires repeated sampling, our results showed that ddPCR technology has made it possible to use liquid biopsy as an adequate minimally invasive alternative for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) detection.