Li M, Zhang C, Deng S, et al. - Lung cancer-associated T cell repertoire (TCR) (LC-aTCR) displayed a higher sensitivity and specificity than other liquid biopsy methods in stage I lung cancer, and represents a candidate biomarker for early detection of this disease. Further testing the combination of TCR-based assay and routine screening in larger cohorts is supported.

• From the real-world low-dose computed tomography screening project, 146 participants including 52 patients with pathologically-confirmed stage I lung cancer and 94 non-cancer controls, were included.

• A motif-based algorithm was constructed to define 80 LC-aTCRs in the training cohort.

• A high sensitivity and specificity of 72% and 91%, respectively, in stage I lung cancer was seen in the validation cohort, and AUC of the ROC curve was 0.91.