A trial looking at measuring circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) and whether it can help doctors decide when to give more treatment (c-TRAK TN)

A total of 161 people had repeated blood tests to check for ctDNA. Of these, 45 people had ctDNA in their blood. They went into one of two treatment groups. 

There were:

• 32 people in the pembrolizumab group
• 13 people in the standard care group

c-TRAK TN trial diagram

Of the 32 people in the pembrolizumab group:

• 5 people (16%) had pembrolizumab
• 4 people (12%) decided not to have pembrolizumab
• 23 people (72%) didn’t have pembrolizumab because their cancer had already spread

The team measured the ctDNA of the 5 people who had pembrolizumab. They found that all 5 still had ctDNA in their blood samples after between 1 and 6 months of treatment.

Conclusion
The research team concluded that it was important to test for ctDNA early. This is because, in this trial, a lot of people had cancer that had already spread when they did the test. This meant that fewer people had pembrolizumab than they were expecting.

They suggest more work is done to look at:

• the best time to measure ctDNA
• using more accurate tests  
• who is most likely to benefit from ctDNA tests

More detailed information
There is more information about this research in the reference below. 

Please note, the article we link to here is not in plain English. It has been written for health care professionals and researchers.

Results of the c-TRAK TN trial: a clinical trial utilising ctDNA mutation tracking to detect molecular residual disease and trigger intervention in patients with moderate- and high-risk early-stage triple-negative breast cancer
N Turner and others
Annals of Oncology, February 2023. Volume 34, issue 2, pages 200 – 211.

Where this information comes from    
We have based this summary on the information in the article above. This has been reviewed by independent specialists (peer reviewed ) and published in a medical journal. We have not analysed the data ourselves. As far as we are aware, the link we list above is active and the article is free and available to view.