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Article History

Received: 19 September 2019

Accepted: 10 February 2020

First Online: 28 February 2020

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: Patients were recruited to the DIAMOND study according to local ethical guidelines (REC ID 03/018). An independent cohort of patients was recruited to the Graz based MonReC study (approved by Ethics Committee of the Medical University of Graz, Austria, approval number 27-210 ex 14/15 and by the Ethics Committee of the Military Institute of Medicine, Warsaw, Poland, approval number 33/WIM/2015. The research conformed to the principles of the Helsinki Declaration. Written informed consent was obtained from all patients before blood draw.

: Not applicable.

: GDS has received educational grants from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Intuitive Surgical, consultancy fees from Merck, Pfizer, EUSA Pharma, and CMR Surgical, travel expenses from Pfizer and speaker fees from Pfizer. NR is a cofounder and shareholder of Inivata Ltd., a cancer genomics company that commercializes ctDNA analysis. TE and AM are employees of AstraZeneca and TE has received research support from AstraZeneca, Bayer, and Pfizer. Inivata and AstraZeneca had no role in the conceptualization, study design, data collection, and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Cancer Research UK has filed patent applications protecting methods described in this manuscript. CGS, FM, KH, JCMW, CEM, NR, and other authors may be listed as co-inventors on patent application numbers 1803596.4 (“Improvements in variant detection”), 1818159.4 (“Enhanced detection of target DNA by fragment size analysis”), and other potential patents describing methods for the analysis of DNA fragments and applications of ctDNA. EH receives funds for the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Liquid Biopsies for Early Detection of Cancer from Freenome and PreAnalytiX. The remaining authors declare that they have no competing interests.