Improved five year mortality in an RCT of a lung cancer biomarker to select people for screening

Risk-based early detection should be cost effective and widely accessible. EarlyCDT-Lung is a blood-based autoantibody biomarker which may improve accessibility to Low dose CT screening. We randomized 12 208 individuals aged 50-75 at high risk of developing lung cancer to either the test or to standard clinical care. Outcomes were ascertained from Register of Deaths and Cancer Registry. Cox proportional hazards models were used to estimate the hazard ratio of the rate of deaths from all causes and lung cancer. Additional analyses were performed for cases of lung cancer diagnosed within two years of the initial test.

After 5 years 326 lung cancers were detected (2.7% of those enrolled). The total number of deaths reported from all causes in the intervention group was 344 compared to 388 in the control group.

There were 73 lung cancer deaths in the intervention arm and 90 in the controls (Adjusted HR 0.789 (0.636, 0.978). An analysis of cases of lung cancer detected within 2 years of randomization in the intervention group showed that there were 34 deaths from all causes and 29 from lung cancer. In the control group there were 56 deaths with 49 from lung cancer. In those diagnosed with lung cancer within 2 years of randomization the hazard ratio for all cause mortality was 0.615 (0.401,0.942) and for lung cancer 0.598 (0.378, 0.946).

Further large-scale studies of the role of biomarkers to target lung cancer screening, in addition to LDCT, should be undertaken.