BioCentury
ARTICLE | Clinical News

Lung-MAP expands to include all advanced NSCLC patients

January 29, 2019 8:33 PM UTC

SWOG's Lung Cancer Master Protocol (Lung-MAP) precision medicine trial is implementing new protocols and expanding to include all advanced stage non-small cell lung cancer patients, moving beyond its initial population of advanced stage squamous cell lung cancer. The new population of patients in Lung-MAP comprises about 85% of all lung cancer diagnoses in the U.S., according to SWOG.

Lung-MAP will also begin using liquid biopsies in its patient screenings. Advances in the field suggest liquid biopsies are increasingly capable of picking up actionable tumor genome signals from minuscule amounts of cell-free circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), circulating tumor cells (CTCs) or tumor-educated blood platelets (TEPs), and sequencing their genomes in a comprehensive, unbiased manner (see "Next-Generation Growth Spurt")...