Personalized, individualized, targeted therapy has successfully found entrance in the palliative treatment of lung cancer as they enable a personalized and individualized strategy going ahead with biomarker testing. Due to the crescending amount of predictive molecular and immunhistochemical analyses at different time points during therapy the need for more and actual tumor tissue increases; however these samples cannot always be obtained without major discomfort for the patients. Therefore, analyses from blood, the so called "liquid biopsy", is an alternative or additional method. Activating mutations in the EGFR gene and the inhibitory mutation T790 M can already be detected from blood during clinical routine. This review presents the status of liquid biopsy for diagnosis, prognosis and as predictive parameter during the course of therapy in lung cancer and gives an outlook on future developments.
© Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.