The Translational Status of Cancer Liquid Biopsies
Journal article, 2021

Precision oncology aims to tailor clinical decisions specifically to patients with the objective of improving treatment outcomes. This can be achieved by leveraging omics information for accurate molecular characterization of tumors. Tumor tissue biopsies are currently the main source of information for molecular profiling. However, biopsies are invasive and limited in resolving spatiotemporal heterogeneity in tumor tissues. Alternative non-invasive liquid biopsies can exploit patient’s body fluids to access multiple layers of tumor-specific biological information (genomes, epigenomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, metabolomes, circulating tumor cells, and exosomes). Analysis and integration of these large and diverse datasets using statistical and machine learning approaches can yield important insights into tumor biology and lead to discovery of new diagnostic, predictive, and prognostic biomarkers. Translation of these new diagnostic tools into standard clinical practice could transform oncology, as demonstrated by a number of liquid biopsy assays already entering clinical use. In this review, we highlight successes and challenges facing the rapidly evolving field of cancer biomarker research. Lay Summary: Precision oncology aims to tailor clinical decisions specifically to patients with the objective of improving treatment outcomes. The discovery of biomarkers for precision oncology has been accelerated by high-throughput experimental and computational methods, which can inform fine-grained characterization of tumors for clinical decision-making. Moreover, advances in the liquid biopsy field allow non-invasive sampling of patient’s body fluids with the aim of analyzing circulating biomarkers, obviating the need for invasive tumor tissue biopsies. In this review, we highlight successes and challenges facing the rapidly evolving field of liquid biopsy cancer biomarker research.

Cancer biomarkers

Liquid biopsy

Multiomics

Predictive biomarkers

Diagnostic biomarkers

Precision medicine

Prognostic biomarkers

Clinical oncology

Author

Sinisa Bratulic

Chalmers, Biology and Biological Engineering, Systems and Synthetic Biology

Francesco Gatto

Elypta AB

Chalmers, Biology and Biological Engineering, Systems and Synthetic Biology

Jens B Nielsen

Chalmers, Biology and Biological Engineering, Systems and Synthetic Biology

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

BioInnovation Institute

Technical University of Denmark (DTU)

Regenerative Engineering and Translational Medicine

23644133 (ISSN) 23644141 (eISSN)

Vol. 7 3 312-352

Subject Categories

Clinical Laboratory Medicine

Biomedical Laboratory Science/Technology

Cancer and Oncology

DOI

10.1007/s40883-019-00141-2

More information

Latest update

10/5/2021