Table 1.

Applications of the elements of circulating tumor cells (CTCs), tumor nucleic acids (ctDNA/ctRNA) and exosomes. Adapted from Siravegna et al. (2018) [7].

Elements	CTCs	ctDNA/ctRNA	Exosomes
Potential to assess tumor spatial and temporal heterogeneity	No	Yes	No
Detection of somatic mutations, indels, alteration of the number of copies and gene fusions	Yes	Yes	Si
Analysis of mRNA, miRNA, IncRNA and gene variants	Yes	Yes	Yes
Evaluation of methylation patterns	Yes	Yes	Yes
Methylation Studies	Yes	No	Yes
Expression Studies	Yes	No	Si
Cell morphology and functional studies ex vivo	Yes	No	No
Signal co-location demonstration	Yes	No	No
Proteomic analysis	Yes	No	Yes