NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Guardant Health today announced that it has partnered with the National Cancer Institute-funded SWOG cancer research consortium to identify mechanisms of resistance and future treatment options in non-small cell lung cancer patients.
The study, called SWOG-1403, will use Guardant's circulating tumor DNA test, Guardant 360, to examine whether combination EGFR blockade using cetuximab and afatinib is superior to afatinib alone as a frontline treatment for 600 patients with newly diagnosed EGFR-mutant NSCLC.
As part of the trial, investigators will test patients' blood at the time of enrollment and again upon progression. Physicians will initially be blinded to the results until the time of progression at which point the findings can then be used to inform adjustments to therapy.
"NSCLC is an ideal tumor type to test this novel technology due to the known genomic complexity and evolution of this genomic landscape after therapy," David Gandara, chair of the SWOG Lung Cancer Committee, said in a statement. "In the case of patients with EGFR-mutated lung cancer, patients may fail first-line treatment due to the emergence of the T790M resistance mutation, which is one of the targets that Guardant360 will be used to detect."