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Alexander Brik, Katharina Wichert, Daniel G. Weber, Katja Szafranski, Peter Rozynek, Swetlana Meier, Yon-Dschun Ko, Reinhard Büttner, Klaus Gerwert, Thomas Behrens, Thomas Brüning, Georg Johnen

• \(\bf Objective\) Lung cancer is the second most frequent cancer type and the most common cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Alteration of gene copy numbers are associated with lung cancer and the determination of copy number variations (CNV) is appropriate for the discrimination between tumor and non-tumor tissue in lung cancer. As telomerase reverse transcriptase (\(\it TERT\)) and v-myc avian myelocytomatosis viral oncogene homolog (\(\it MYC\)) play a role in lung cancer the aims of this study were the verification of our recent results analyzing \(\it MYC\) CNV in tumor and non-tumor tissue of lung cancer patients using an independent study group and the assessment of \(\it TERT\) CNV as an additional marker. \(\bf Results\) \(\it TERT\) and \(\it MYC\) status was analyzed using digital PCR (dPCR) in tumor and adjacent non-tumor tissue samples of 114 lung cancer patients. The difference between tumor and non-tumor samples were statistically significant (p < 0.0001) for \(\it TERT\) and \(\it MYC\). Using a predefined specificity of 99% a sensitivity of 41% and 51% was observed for \(\it TERT\) and \(\it MYC\), respectively. For the combination of \(\it TERT\) and \(\it MYC\) the overall sensitivity increased to 60% at 99% specificity. We demonstrated that a combination of markers increases the performance in comparison to individual markers. Additionally, the determination of CNV using dPCR might be an appropriate tool in precision medicine.