Abstract 537: NTRK1 fusion detection from clinical cfDNA NGS using a de novo fusion caller
Authors: Yablonovitch Arielle , Gnerre Sante , Yen Jennifer , Shell Scott , Helman Elena , Fairclough Stephen , Nagy Rebecca J. , Odegaard Justin , Chudova Darya , Talasaz AmirAli 
Published: July 2021

Background: NTRK rearrangements, though rare in common cancers, are clinically actionable targets with two FDA-approved drugs for pan-cancer indications, larotrectinib and entrectinib. Fusion detection from ctDNA provides an opportunity to facilitate screening for this biomarker, though technical challenges such as heterogeneity in fusion partners remain. To address this, we developed an assembly-based de novo fusion algorithm that does not rely on a fixed set of partner genes and applied it to &gt;18,000 clinical samples to detect NTRK1 fusions.

Methods: A cohort of 18,867 patients across multiple cancer types (lung adenocarcinoma, breast cancer, and colorectal adenocarcinoma), plus 276 healthy control samples were previously tested with Guardant360(R), a CLIA-validated 74-gene cfDNA NGS-based assay. The median unique molecule coverage was approximately 3,000 molecules sequenced to 15,000x read depth. Samples were reanalyzed in silico using the de novo fusion algorithm: in brief, reads aligned to candidate fusion breakpoints were assembled into de Bruijn graphs. Resulting contigs were aligned to the reference and analytical filters were applied to achieve high specificity.

Results: NTRK1 fusions were detected in 0.13% of patients, a similar prevalence to what has been previously described in tissue (Rosen et al., 2020). No fusions were identified in 276 healthy control samples. When examining intergenic fusions, 53% of fusions included previously characterized partner genes (TPM3, TPR, LMNA, and TP53), while the remaining fusions contained novel partners.The majority of NTRK1 fusion partners (76%) were detected only once, consistent with previous studies. KRAS G12D and BRAF V600E were detected in 17% and 13% of NTRK1 fusion-positive patients, respectively, and occurred predominantly in the colorectal cohort; most variants (60%) were subclonal to the NTRK1 fusion, and have been previously shown to be associated with resistance to TRK inhibitors through downstream activation of the MAPK pathway. The on-target resistance variant NTRK1 G595R was detected in 8% of patients positive for NTRK1 fusions, all of which were subclonal to the fusion. EGFR L858R was detected in 13% of NTRK1 fusion-positive patients, all of which were clonal to the fusion and in the lung cohort, in accordance with previous studies showing NTRK1 fusions as a resistance mechanism to TKIs in EGFR-positive NSCLC (Xia et al., 2020).

Conclusions: NTRK1 fusions were detected in cfDNA at a similar prevalence to tissue NGS, demonstrating high sensitivity of plasma-based assays to detect these fusions. NTRK1 fusion partners were diverse, with the majority of partner genes observed only once across the cohort. Both clonal and subclonal NTRK1 rearrangements were detected, affirming that this biomarker can emerge as an oncogenic driver or as a mechanism of resistance.

Citation Format: Arielle Yablonovitch, Sante Gnerre, Jennifer Yen, Scott Shell, Elena Helman, Stephen Fairclough, Rebecca J. Nagy, Justin Odegaard, Darya Chudova, AmirAli Talasaz. NTRK1 fusion detection from clinical cfDNA NGS using a de novo fusion caller [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2021; 2021 Apr 10-15 and May 17-21. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2021;81(13_Suppl):Abstract nr 537.