Publication Date:
2008-11-16
Description:
Changes in circulating levels of biomarkers of cell death (such as nucleosomal DNA, nDNA) within days of starting chemotherapy are highly predictive of end of treatment response rates and progression-free survival in acute myeloid leukaemia, lung and bowel cancers1–3. In aggressive lymphoma, depth of response as measured by computed tomography (CT) at the end of treatment is a useful predictor of long-term survival4. If early blood-borne biomarker data were predictive of end of treatment response in lymphoma, this may provide an opportunity to make timely changes to treatment. Thus the aims of this study were to measure circulating nDNA before and during chemotherapy for lymphoma, to correlate biomarker changes in blood levels with those in one and two dimensional (1, 2D) tumor measurements by CT and to evaluate the sensitivity of blood-borne nDNA and imaging biomarkers for predicting treatment response. Serum samples from 17 patients with lymphoma (8 Hodgkin (HL) and 9 Non Hodgkin (NHL) cases) treated with standard chemotherapy were analysed for nDNA using the cell death detection kit™ (Roche) according to manufacturers’ instructions. Serial samples were taken pre-treatment (day 1 baseline) and on days 3, 8 and 15 of the first chemotherapy cycle. Control samples were taken from a healthy volunteer panel. Baseline and end of therapy CT images were obtained using a LightSpeed Plus CT scanner with typical helical acquisition parameters. Data were acquired following intravenous contrast and images were reformatted to contiguous non-overlapping 5mm slices to allow future calculation of tumor volume. One and 2D measurements of tumor size were determined by a radiologist blinded to nDNA data. Levels of nDNA were significantly higher in all lymphoma subtypes compared with 61 healthy controls (median 1.4 vs 0.3, p
Print ISSN:
0006-4971
Electronic ISSN:
1528-0020
Topics:
Biology
,
Medicine
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