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Clinical Perspectives in the Use of Liquid Biopsy in Metastatic Breast Cancer

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Circulating Tumor Cells

Part of the book series: Current Cancer Research ((CUCR))

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Abstract

Precision medicine aims to improve healthcare by identifying subsets of patients that are more likely to benefit from specific treatment strategies. Liquid biopsy offers the unique potential to better understand and monitor disease biology, since it is not burdened by the temporal and spatial limitations of tissue biopsy. CTC (circulating tumor cell) characterization is being explored as an alternative and flexible tool to identify predictive and prognostic biomarkers thanks to its capability of recapitulating a complete biological system.

The present chapter will summarize the current clinical applications of CTC enumeration and its combination with other liquid biopsy technologies such as ctDNA. It will, moreover, offer new insights on non-canonical CTCs, which are emerging as a new entity with respect to epithelial circulating cells, and emerging multi-omics essays that may evolve into new comprehensive profiling workflows.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medical Oncology, CRO Aviano, National Cancer Institute, IRCCS, Aviano, Italy

    Lorenzo Gerratana

  2. Division of Hematology-Oncology, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA

    Carolina Reduzzi & Massimo Cristofanilli

  3. Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA

    Paolo D’Amico, Saya Liz Jacob & Wenan Qiang

  4. Department of Medicine, University of Udine, Udine, Italy

    Roberta Mazzeo

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  1. Lorenzo Gerratana
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  2. Carolina Reduzzi
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  3. Paolo D’Amico
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  4. Roberta Mazzeo
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  5. Saya Liz Jacob
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  6. Wenan Qiang
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  7. Massimo Cristofanilli
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Correspondence to Massimo Cristofanilli .

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  1. Department of Pathology and Immunology, Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Richard J. Cote

  2. ACTC Lab, Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Evi Lianidou

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Gerratana, L. et al. (2023). Clinical Perspectives in the Use of Liquid Biopsy in Metastatic Breast Cancer. In: Cote, R.J., Lianidou, E. (eds) Circulating Tumor Cells. Current Cancer Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22903-9_21

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