Clinical management of bladder cancer (BC) patients offers several challenges such as poor outcome because of elevated recurrence rates and lack of response to chemotherapy [1]. So, there is a need of noninvasive prognostic and predictive tools able to allow risk category assessment and real-time supervision of drug response [2]. Recently, circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have been proposed as prognostic tool able to improve cancer patients' clinical management [3], [4], [5], [6]. CTCs detached from the primary tumor, enter the bloodstream and colonize distant organ, promoting cancer dissemination [7]. Emerging technologies are available to isolate CTC from patient's blood to provide a "liquid biopsy". Such a tool provides a molecular picture of the metastatic disease, useful to assess the cause of drug resistance onset [3, 6, 8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14]. CTC are very scarce in the blood, so robust methods are still needed for their routine use in laboratory practice [3, 11]. Several technologies have been developed in the last few years [11, 12] and several studies have been performed on the potential use of CTCs in bladder cancer patient clinical management.
Circulating tumor cells in bladder cancer: A new horizon of liquid biopsy for precision medicine
Cimmino A;
2021
Abstract
Clinical management of bladder cancer (BC) patients offers several challenges such as poor outcome because of elevated recurrence rates and lack of response to chemotherapy [1]. So, there is a need of noninvasive prognostic and predictive tools able to allow risk category assessment and real-time supervision of drug response [2]. Recently, circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have been proposed as prognostic tool able to improve cancer patients' clinical management [3], [4], [5], [6]. CTCs detached from the primary tumor, enter the bloodstream and colonize distant organ, promoting cancer dissemination [7]. Emerging technologies are available to isolate CTC from patient's blood to provide a "liquid biopsy". Such a tool provides a molecular picture of the metastatic disease, useful to assess the cause of drug resistance onset [3, 6, 8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14]. CTC are very scarce in the blood, so robust methods are still needed for their routine use in laboratory practice [3, 11]. Several technologies have been developed in the last few years [11, 12] and several studies have been performed on the potential use of CTCs in bladder cancer patient clinical management.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
