AIRC confirms the usefulness of liquid biopsy
Biopsy is the most commonly used test to diagnose tumor. Usually, it consists in a tissue sample analysed later by microscope and represents one of the main instruments in doctors’ hands to discover many valuable information about the disease. Thanks to the expert eyes of the pathologist, in fact, from a little piece of tumor tissue it’s possible, in many cases, to understand what type of tumor is and even how much is aggressive. It can be also verified the presence of particular markers useful to guide the choice of the treatment and to classify the disease in a more precise way. Sometimes biopsy is not enough, and in some cases is not even possible to do it. Even if it’s performed by a skilled doctor, is still a targeted sampling, while the tumor is a heterogeneous disease which presents different characteristics in different areas: it can occur that the sampled tissue does not represent exactly the tumor load. Furthermore, with the biopsy it can be obtained a “static” picture of the tumor at the moment of the diagnosis, but the disease changes and transforms over time.
Read the origial articles