Current clinically validated applications of liquid biopsy

Abstract

The development of NGS technologies for the study of ctDNA has greatly broadened the possibilities of the clinical application of liquid biopsy (LB). The availability of large gene panels allows obtaining a complete genomic profile of the neoplasm even starting from a few nanograms of ctDNA usually arising from peripheral blood plasma extraction. Several studies have shown that the genetic profile derived from the ctDNA analysis is similar to that obtained from the analysis of tissue tumor DNA, especially in lung cancer, even if there are now applications to almost all neoplasms. In this chapter, we aimed to summarize the novel applications of LB in several different histologies.