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Liquid biopsies
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Abstract
<p class="first" id="d9255892e70">Liquid biopsy is based on minimally invasive blood
tests and has a high potential
to significantly change the therapeutic strategy in cancer patients, providing an
extremely powerful and reliable noninvasive clinical tool for the individual molecular
profiling of patients in real time. Liquid biopsy approaches include the analysis
of circulating tumor cells (CTCs), circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), circulating miRNAs,
and tumor-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs) that are shed from primary tumors and
their metastatic sites into peripheral blood. The major advantage of liquid biopsy
analysis is that it is minimally invasive, and can be serially repeated, thus allowing
extracting information from the tumor in real time. Moreover, the identification of
predictive biomarkers in peripheral blood that can monitor response to therapy in
real time holds a very strong potential for novel approaches in the therapeutic management
of cancer patients. In this review, we summarize recent knowledge on CTCs and ctDNA
and discuss future trends in the field.
</p>