Comprehensive analysis of aneuploidy status and its effect on the efficacy of EGFR-TKIs in lung cancer

Background: Lung cancer has the highest mortality rate among cancers worldwide, and most patients are diagnosed with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), and evaluating the clinical efficacy of molecularly targeted cancer therapy remains a major challenge.

Methods: This paper retrospectively investigated the outcome information of 291 lung cancer patients detected by next-generation sequencing (NGS) analysis and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), including 63 patients with lung cancer who were followed up. We analyzed epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation abundance and aneuploidy status to evaluate clinical efficacy.

Results: The progress free survival (PFS) of patients diagnosed as euploidy was actually higher than that of patients diagnosed with aneuploidy, and was related to both the objective response rate (ORR) and disease control rate (DCR). Patients with an epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation abundance ≥28.86% had slightly higher ORR and similar DCR. Two-way analysis of variance was used to assess the effects of EGFR mutation abundance and tumor aneuploidy status on patients' PFS. The results indicated a strong correlation between aneuploidy status and clinical efficacy, with euploid patients having a higher ORR and DCR.

Conclusions: Aneuploidy status could effectively evaluate the clinical efficacy of patients with lung cancer. However, EGFR mutations abundance could not predict the extent of benefit from tyrosine kinase inhibitors (EGFR-TKI) treatment.