Origins, structures, and functions of circulating DNA in oncology
By Alain R. Thierry, S. Messaoudi, P. Gahan, Philippe Anker, M. Stroun. Cancer Metastasis Review, 2016
742 citations recorded by the source corpus.
While various clinical applications especially in oncology are now in progress such as diagnosis, prognosis, therapy monitoring, or patient follow-up, the determination of structural characteristics of cell-free circulating DNA (cirDNA) are still being researched. Nevertheless, some specific structures have been identified and cirDNA has been shown to be composed of many “kinds.” This structural description goes hand-in-hand with the mechanisms of its origins such as apoptosis, necrosis, active release, phagocytosis, and exocytose. There are multiple structural forms of cirDNA depending upon the mechanism of release: particulate structures (exosomes, microparticles, apoptotic bodies) or macromolecular structures (nucleosomes, virtosomes/proteolipidonucleic acid complexes, DNA traps, links with serum proteins or to the cell-free membrane parts). In addition, cirDNA concerns both nuclear and/or mitochondrial DNA with both species exhibiting different structural characteristics that potentially reveal different forms of biological stability or diagnostic significance. This review focuses on the origins, structures and functional aspects that are paradoxically less well described in the literature while numerous reviews are directed to the clinical application of cirDNA. Differentiation of the various structures and better knowledge of the fate of cirDNA would considerably expand the diagnostic power of cirDNA analysis especially with regard to the patient follow-up enlarging the scope of personalized medicine. A better understanding of the subsequent fate of cirDNA would also help in deciphering its functional aspects such as their capacity for either genometastasis or their pro-inflammatory and immunological effects.
Subfields: Cancer Research, Molecular Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f177111ede169f216cbdaae656054bf5e49142e
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In Cancer Research
In Molecular Biology
Citations in the corpus
- ESMO recommendations on the use of circulating tumour DNA assays for patients with cancer: a report from the ESMO Precision Medicine Working Group. (2022, background): “8 In cancer patients, a variable fraction of plasma DNA derives from tumour (i.e. ctDNA fraction).”
- Tumor microenvironment complexity and therapeutic implications at a glance (2020, background): “In cancerous conditions, cfDNA is derived not only from the cancer cells but also from TME and other noncancer cells, e.g., endothelial and immune cells [196, 197] .”