ScanTCR Enables Early Cancer Detection by Repertoire-Scale Representation of Cancer-Associated T-Cell Receptors in Peripheral Blood.

ScanTCR achieves over 90% accuracy in early cancer detection across seven cancer types by analyzing the full TCR repertoire in peripheral blood.

• Why it matters: Early detection of cancer significantly improves treatment outcomes, but current methods overlook many crucial cancer-associated TCRs by focusing only on high-frequency receptors, limiting sensitivity.
• What they did: The team developed ScanTCR, a computational framework that uses a reference-guided, repertoire-scale encoding method to incorporate all TCRs from peripheral blood samples, enabling comprehensive analysis.
• The result: ScanTCR outperformed existing methods in distinguishing cancer patients from healthy individuals, including unseen cancer types, and identified caTCRs linked to enhanced immune responses, supporting its potential for noninvasive early diagnosis.