Lung Cancer

Lung cancer is the most common cancer worldwide, with 5-year survival rate lower than 14%. According to GLOBOCAN 2020, there were 19.3 million new lung cancer cases and 9.96 million deaths. Due to its high incidence and mortality, lung cancer is leading cause of cancer deaths globally. Lack of early obvious clinical symptoms contribute greatly to the high mortality.Pulmonary nodules are common manifestation of lung diseases. While a pulmonary nodule is greater than 6mm, there is a high risk of lung cancer.

TCR

In humans, TCRβ chain is produced by the random recombination of variable (V), diversity (D) and joining (J) gene segments named ‘VDJ recombination’. VDJ recombination generates the highly variable complementary determining region 3 (CDR3) which is the key to recognizing the antigenic peptide specifically. This process can produce an incredible diversity of TCRs with a theoretical bound on the numbers of unique variants of ~1013 for TCRβ chain. Thus, the analysis of TCR repertoire can be used for the study of immune response to lung cancers.