Cancer-Devoted Liquid Biopsies and Applications to Prostate Cancer

Abstract

Human Prostate cancer (PCa), the second most frequent in men, is facing two yet unsolved problems: first, at diagnosis, the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test is not specific enough, which results in too much false positive detection; secondly, at the last tumor step, the metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) is of very bad survival prognosis. Therefore, tools are urgently needed for helping the active surveillance before any treatment and for monitoring treatment of advanced prostate cancer for trying to slow down the fatal issue. This survey corresponds to a pertinent -but not completeselection among many recent papers, searched in PubMed and Web of Science with the keywords "Liquid Biopsy" and "Prostate Cancer". It is aimed to give an overview of the existing methods searching for a satisfying reliable clinical test, i. e. obtained from easy accessible bodyfluids such as blood or urine, in order to replace the invasive needle tissue biopsies for frequent therapeutic control of PCa development. Taking into account the huge heterogeneity of the tumor process, elaborating a convenient liquid biopsy is also a necessary step towards a further individually-adapted precision medicine for curing prostate cancer. The most promising perspectives for clinical analysis of PCa through liquid biopsy will be discussed.