Research Progress on Circulating Tumor DNA in Renal Cell Carcinoma

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is one of the most common tumors in urinary system, and its incidence ranks 7th and 8th in male and female in the United States with a continuous upward trend in last 5 years. In China, RCC also shows a significant growth trend. Because the early symptoms are not obvious, many patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage of the disease and often have a poor prognosis. Therefore, early diagnosis and treatment are particularly important for RCC control. With the advent of the era of innovation in imaging modalities, even early detection of RCC in patients is not possible. However, with the steady increase in the value of liquid biopsy and the emergence of Next-generation sequencing technology, the research on tumor genomics continues to advance, and sequencing combined with liquid biopsy is applied in solid tumors. With this merging, circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) detection is becoming more and more mature, providing a new tool to resolve this problem. Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) is a tumor-derived fragment of DNA in blood or body fluids. It can reflect the information of the entire tumor genome and is easy to obtain. ctDNA has important clinical application in tumor diagnosis, prognosis, and monitoring of disease recurrence, therapeutic effect and chemotherapy resistance. Recent studies show that ctDNA also have clinical value in RCCS as circulating tumor DNA detection may serve as a biomarker for early diagnosis, and monitoring disease course. This article reviews the application of ctDNA in the clinical diagnosis and treatment of RCCS.