Immediate Postoperative Minimal Residual Disease Detection with MAESTRO Predicts Recurrence and Survival in Head and Neck Cancer Patients Treated with Surgery

We selected 24 patients with locally advanced head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) who were surgically treated. MAESTRO, our ultrasensitive, tumor-informed, mutation enrichment sequencing assay, was applied in a pooled format (MAESTRO-Pool) to plasma samples collected from these patients at baseline (pre-op) and postoperatively. We show that detection of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) 1 to 9 days after surgery is associated with significantly worse survival. Many plasma samples also had tumor fractions detected below 100 parts-per-million, the detection limit for first-generation commercial assays, highlighting the need for more sensitive ctDNA assays. Here we provide whole genome sequencing of matched tumor biopsy and normal germline DNA from 24 patients that were used to identify somatic single nucleotide variants (SNVs) to be tracked using our MAESTRO-Pool assay.]]>
Patients with stage II-IV HNSCC undergoing definitive surgical treatment were selected for the study. We excluded patients with distant metastasis or any other known malignancies from the study. Patients had preoperative staging imaging to exclude distant metastasis with a positron-emission tomography (PET) and/or computed tomography (CT).]]>