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. 2022 May 11;21:114. doi: 10.1186/s12943-022-01588-8

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© The Author(s) 2022

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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Fig. 2 — Overview of the liquid biopsy process, from hypothesized mechanisms of tumour release of liquid biopsy components, to laboratory analysis techniques. Tumour biomarkers are first released and enter the circulation via one of three main mechanisms: apoptosis, necrosis, or secretion. Liquid biopsy involves the collection and analysis of five distinctive tumour components from peripheral blood samples: cell-free nucleic acids (cfDNA/ctDNA, cfRNA), CTCs, exosomes and tumour educated platelets. Tumour components in peripheral blood samples are then captured and analyzed using their corresponding laboratory assays. cfDNA: circulating free DNA, ctDNA: circulating tumour DNA, cfRNA: cell-free RNA, CTCs: circulating tumour cells, TEPs: tumour educated platelets, NGS: next generation sequencing, qPCR: quantitative polymerase chain reaction