Adewale Adeleke
Cancer management has entered an era where molecular information increasingly guides diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic decision making.Traditional tissue biopsy, while foundational, is limited by invasiveness, sampling bias, and inability to capture temporal tumor evolution.Liquid biopsy has emerged as a transformative approach that overcomes many of these limitations by enabling minimally invasive, repeatable sampling of tumor-derived components in body fluids.Among these, circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) has gained particular prominence due to its ability to reflect the genomic landscape of tumors in real time.This review explores the biological basis of ctDNA, technological advances in its detection, and its expanding clinical applications in cancer monitoring and precision therapy.It also examines current limitations, including sensitivity challenges and standardization issues, while highlighting future directions that may solidify ctDNA as a central tool in oncology.