Cellular Physiology and Biochemistry (Jun 2018)

Circulating Tumor DNA as a Sensitive Marker in Patients Undergoing Irreversible Electroporation for Pancreatic Cancer

  • Mao Lin,
  • Mohammed Alnaggar,
  • Shuzhen Liang,
  • Jibing Chen,
  • Kecheng Xu,
  • Shihua Dong,
  • Duanming Du,
  • Lizhi Niu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1159/000490874
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 47, no. 4
pp. 1556 – 1564

Abstract

Read online

Background/Aims: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is often diagnosed at an advanced stage, resulting in extremely poor 5-year survival. Late diagnosis of PDAC is mainly due to lack of a reliable method of early detection. Carbohydrate antigen (CA) 19-9 is often used as a tumor biomarker in PDAC; however, the test lacks sensitivity and specificity. Therefore, new sensitive and minimally invasive diagnostic tools are required to detect pancreatic cancer. Methods: Here, we investigated circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) which contained KRAS-mutated as a potential diagnostic tool for PDAC patients who underwent irreversible electroporation (IRE). We used droplet digital polymerase chain reaction (ddPCR) to detect the expression of KRAS-mutated genes in plasma samples of 65 PDAC patients who underwent IRE. Results: In these 65 cases, ctDNA was detected in 20 (29.2%) samples. The median overall survival (OS) was 11.4 months with ctDNA+ patients and 14.3 months for ctDNA- patients. ctDNA+ patients had a obviously poorer prognosis associated to overall survival (P < 0.001). Conclusion: Our results suggested that the existence of ctDNA was a predictor of survival for PDAC patients. Therefore, ctDNA may be a new sensitive biomarker for monitoring treatment outcome in PDAC.

Keywords