Droplet Digital PCR: An Emerging Technology for Cutaneous Melanoma Detection and Monitoring
Year: 2021
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is a public health issue and a significant challenge for scientists. At the dawn of the “omics era”, we witnessed groundbreaking advances in CM molecular stratification and therapeutic management assisted by genomic profiling and sequencing technologies. However, melanomagenesis is a complex and multifactorial process that cannot be restricted to genomic aspects, requiring investigation from a multi-omics perspective. Recently, droplet digital polymerase chain reaction (ddPCR) emerged as a powerful omics technology that can be used for absolute allele quantification, copy number variation (CNV) analysis, rare mutation and DNA methylation detection, genetic rearrangements, and transcriptomic evaluations in different types of biological samples, revolutionizing CM biomedical research and clinical care. This paper presents how ddPCR can complement existing approaches in the field to detect multiple types of alterations in both body fluids as well as formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues harvested from CM patients and highlights how these findings may broaden our vision on CM diagnosis, prognosis and therapy in the context of precision medicine.
Authors: Elena-Georgiana Dobre, Monica Neagu
Institutions: University of Bucharest, Institutul National Victor Babes
Language: English
Subfield: Oncology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4250518037