Abstract
Colorectal cancer is one of the most frequent solid malignancies worldwide. The treatment is either surgical or multimodal and depends on the stage of the disease at diagnosis. Accurate disease assessment is thus of great importance for choosing the most optimal treatment strategy. However, the standard means of disease assessment by radiological imaging or histopathological analysis of the removed tumor tissue lack the sensitivity in detecting the early systemic spread of the disease. To overcome this deficiency, the concept of liquid biopsy from the peripheral blood of patients has emerged as a new, very promising diagnostic tool. In this article, we provide an overview of the current status of clinical research on liquid biopsy in colorectal cancer. We also highlight the clinical situations in which the concept might be of the greatest benefit for the management of colorectal cancer patients in the future.
Highlights
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most frequent forms of solid cancer in the developed world
Since it is expected that the detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs)/circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) is probably more sensitive and specific for the detection of tumor recurrence than certain tumor markers (CEA) alone, liquid biopsy might replace the use of tumor markers during the course of patients’ follow-ups
It has been recognized that clinical medicine does not profit from technical advances if the latter are only distributed within the technical community
Summary
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most frequent forms of solid cancer in the developed world. The clinical disease assessment and staging based on histopathological tumor tissue analysis, prognostically significant for the population level, cannot provide clinically useful prognostic and predictive information for an individual patient’s level [2,3]. For this reason, clinical scientists are constantly looking for more reliable individual biomarkers. The term liquid biopsy has recently been broadened and is currently used for the detection of all tumor traits (CTCs, ctDNA, exosomes, microRNAs, and others) in the peripheral blood of patients [14,15,16,17,18]. We describe the potential clinical use of liquid biopsy on the case of CRC
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