Evaluation of three advanced methodologies, COLD-PCR, microarray and ddPCR, for identifying the mutational status by liquid biopsies in metastatic colorectal cancer patients

摘要

A major effort has been focused on the detection of oncogenes' mutations in diverse types of clinical specimens including formalin-fixed and paraffin embedded tissues, presently the gold standard samples, up to plasma, that constitute a noninvasive alternative source of tumor DNA. The reliable detection of mutations in circulating tumor DNA requires a high analytical sensitivity. Here, we applied three different highly sensitive methodologies (COLD-PCR, a microarray-based approach and the droplet digital PCR, ddPCR) to identify mutations in the plasma of 30 metastatic colorectal cancer patients previously genotyped on tissue biopsy.