V Scholar Plus Award- extended funding for exceptional V Scholars
Aggressive lymphomas are cancers of white blood cells. The most common type is called diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL). Most patients with DLBCL can be cured by chemotherapy, but some patients either do not respond to treatment or the disease comes back after a certain time (‘relapse’). If we can identify those patients likely to relapse earlier, we hope to improve their chance of survival. Circulating tumor DNA (‘ctDNA’) is DNA that comes from tumor cells and gets in the blood stream. CtDNA in the patient’s blood can be analyzed to get more information about the tumor. In this study, we developed a blood test to profile ctDNA at different stages of the disease and to identify patients at risk for relapse. We found that ctDNA in the patient’s blood contains information that can be used to tell how well the patients will do with chemotherapy. We also observed that analysis of ctDNA over the course of treatment could show how their lymphomas change over time. For example, we detected new mistakes (‘mutations’) in ctDNA that could be used as an early signal to predict that certain treatments would no longer work in these patients. Also, we found that ctDNA in the blood after treatment predicts disease relapse months earlier than any other clinical method. Our test can also give physicians early warning that the tumor is changing from a slow growing to a fast growing lymphoma type. All this information in ctDNA can be used to learn more about lymphoma biology and to find patient groups with high risk for relapse.
