Monitoring of Metastatic Breast Cancer Using Circulating Tumour DNA: A Comparison With Circulating Tumour Cells

Abstract

Background Management of metastatic breast cancer (MBC) requires monitoring of tumour response to determine treatment efficacy. Imaging is routinely used, but is often a poor indicator of dynamic clinical response. Circulating tumour cells (CTCs) have been extensively studied but dynamics of cell-free DNA carrying tumour-specific alterations (circulating tumour DNA, ctDNA) has only recently been demonstrated. We performed the first direct comparison of CTCs and ctDNA in relation to medical imaging, to compare the performance of these biomarkers for the non-invasive monitoring of MBC. Methods Clinical details, imaging and serial whole blood were collected prospectively from women undergoing t..