Natera Announces New Study Highlighting the Benefits of Signatera’s Unique Method of Quantifying ctDNA

Pan-cancer study showed MTM/mL dynamics were more predictive of therapy response than mVAF dynamics, with an observed hazard ratio nearly 2x higher

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Natera, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTRA), a global leader in cell-free DNA testing, today announced a new study published in Molecular Oncology comparing the performance of mean tumor molecules per milliliter (MTM/mL) against mean variant allele frequency (mVAF) for measuring circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), using Signatera™, Natera’s personalized and tumor-informed molecular residual disease (MRD) test. The full study can be found here.

To date, mVAF and MTM/mL are the two main metrics that have been used to quantify ctDNA levels in the blood. Unlike mVAF, which is a fraction that can be confounded by changes in total background cfDNA, MTM/mL takes into account total cfDNA as well as plasma volume. The premise is that MTM/mL is therefore more representative of a patient’s true disease burden, a hypothesis that was validated in this study.

The study analyzed ctDNA data generated in 55,183 ctDNA-positive samples from 23,543 patients who underwent testing with Signatera for various cancer diagnoses, and it reported the correlation between MTM/mL and mVAF, as well as the correlations of each with patient outcomes.

Key findings include:

• Among the 18,426 patients with longitudinal ctDNA measurements, 13.3% had discordant ctDNA trajectories (increase/decrease) when calculated using MTM/mL versus mVAF.
• In patients with stage IV disease receiving immunotherapy (N=51), ctDNA dynamics measured in MTM/mL were more predictive of therapy response than those measured in mVAF, with a hazard ratio (HR) nearly 2x higher (MTM/mL HR 16, p