Liquid Biopsy for Advanced Cancer: An Amplicon-Based Massively Parallel Sequencing Panel Approach to Precision Oncology.

Although discovered in the 1940s (Mandel and Metais, C R Seances Soc Biol Fil 142:241-243, 1948), cell-free DNA has only recently become a tool practical for use in clinical settings. The challenges associated with detection of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in patient plasma are many and exist in the pre-analytical, analytical, and post-analytical periods. Initiation of a ctDNA program in a small academic clinical laboratory setting can be challenging.