Detection of clinically relevant epidermal growth factor receptor pathway mutations in circulating cell-free tumor DNA using next generation sequencing in squamous cell carcinoma lung

Next Generation Sequencing Technology in Lung Cancer Diagnosis

Simple Summary

Lung cancer is still one of the most commonly diagnosed and deadliest cancers in the world. Its diagnosis at an early stage is highly necessary and will improve the standard of care of this disease. The aim of this article is to review the importance and applications of next generation sequencing in lung cancer diagnosis. As observed in many studies, next generation sequencing has been proven as a very helpful tool in the early detection of different types of cancers, including lung cancer, and has been used in the clinic, mainly due to its many advantages, such as low cost, speed, efficacy, low quantity usage of biological samples, and diversity.

Abstract

Lung cancer is still one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers, and one of the deadliest. The high death rate is mainly due to the late stage of diagnosis and low response rate to therapy. Previous and ongoing research studies have tried to discover new reliable and useful cbiomarkers for the diagnosis and prognosis of lung cancer. Next generation sequencing has become an essential tool in cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and evaluation of the treatment response. This article aims to review the leading research and clinical applications in lung cancer diagnosis using next generation sequencing. In this scope, we identified the most relevant articles that present the successful use of next generation sequencing in identifying biomarkers for early diagnosis correlated to lung cancer diagnosis and treatment. This technique can be used to evaluate a high number of biomarkers in a short period of time and from small biological samples, which makes NGS the preferred technique to develop clinical tests for personalized medicine using liquid biopsy, the new trend in oncology.