Assessment of the clinical application of detecting EGFR, KRAS, PIK3CA and BRAF mutations in patients with non-small cell lung cancer using next-generation sequencing.

BACKGROUND:Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has been widely applied in clinical research, while its application in routine clinical molecular testing requires careful validation. The aim of our study was to assess the clinical usefulness of the NextDaySeq Lung panel on Ion Torrent™ PGM in mutation detection of actionable genes in lung cancer. METHODS:The NextDaySeq assay was evaluated by blinded comparisons to Quantitative Real-Time PCR (qPCR) assays with 188 consecutive samples from Chinese patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) to detect mutations in EGFR, KRAS, PIK3CA and BRAF. Discordant variants were further validated by Sanger sequencing and independent qPCR and NGS assays. RESULTS:Our results showed 93.3% concordance of reportable variants mutually covered in both NGS and qPCR assays, with a clinical sensitivity of 89.9%, specificity of 97.5%. Through the comparison, the NGS assays demonstrated its advantages in offering more clinical relevant information, such as detecting non-hotspot mutations and providing mutation allele frequencies (MAF) and accurate mutation sequences. The analytical sensitivity of NGS to detect mutations with low MAF needs further improvement. CONCLUSIONS:The NextDaySeq Lung panel exhibited good clinical performance, strongly supporting the implementation of the NGS assay in routine clinical use to facilitate therapeutic decision-making for lung cancer patients.