Fig. 1

Tumor burden at different lines of therapy. a Violin plot of the circulating tumor cell counts per 7.5 ml of blood using the CellSearch platform partitioned according to line of therapy. The black horizontal lines within the violin plots denote the median of the density estimate. Blue points represent the circulating tumor cell counts in individual blood samples. A one-sided Wilcoxon rank sum test was applied to investigate if the baseline samples of, for example, mCRPC1 had lower tumor burden than mCRPC2. Y-axis: log10 transformed circulating tumor cell counts. X-axis: line of therapy. b as a but for circulating tumor DNA fraction. Y-axis: circulating tumor DNA fraction. In total, 364 blood samples from 217 cases are displayed here; however, only 340/364 had a successful circulating tumor cell count. The dashed lines at 0.02, 0.10, and 0.20 denote the cutoffs to reliably detect point mutations, loss of heterozygosity, and homozygous deletions, respectively. Abbreviations: mHNPC[number], metastatic hormone naïve prostate cancer and line of therapy; mHSPC[number], metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer and line of therapy; mCRPC[number], metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer and line of therapy; _B, baseline, blood samples collected at start of a new systemic therapy; _F, follow-up, blood samples collected during a systemic therapy; Nbr, number of cell-free DNA samples profiled in each category