Clinical application of liquid biopsy in cancer patients

Abstract Background This study was to determine the prevalence and clinical significance of clonal hematopoiesis (CH)-related variants, and somatic and germline mutations in cancer patients and healthy individuals. Methods We performed next-generation sequencing of 275 cancer-related genes be-tween plasma and white blood cells in 92 cancer patients and 47 controls without cancer. Blood samples were recruited from May 2017 to July 2021, and blood cancer patients were excluded. For all statistical analysis in this study, p < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results Overall, 38.04% of patients and 46.81% of controls harbored at least one CH-related mutation in plasma cell-free DNA. Based on our results, older cancer patients exhibited a CH phenomenon more frequently than younger patients ( p = 0.0024). A total of 39 somatic pathogenic (P)/likely pathogenic (LP) mutations were identified in 17 genes in 21 of 92 patients. We found that the presence of P/LP variants in cancer-related gene predicted shorter overall survival (OS) ( p = 0.001). Multivariate analysis adjusted for CH-related mutations, germline mutations, and tumor stage, also indicated that somatic mutations correlated significantly with OS ( p = 0.022). Moreover, the frequency of a germline P/LP variant was that of seven of 92 individuals in the cancer group and one of 42 individuals in the control group. Conclusions We characterized the CH-related variants, and somatic and germline mutations in cancer patients and healthy individuals, and the results have important clinical significance.