Elena Ricciardi

In recent years, medicine has undergone profound changes, strongly entering a new phase defined as the “era of precision medicine”. In this context, patient clinical management involves various scientific approaches that allow for a comprehensive pathology evaluation: from preventive processes (where applicable) to genetic and diagnostic studies. In this scenario, biobanks play an important role and, over the years, have gained increasing prestige, moving from small deposits to large collections of samples of various natures. Disease-oriented biobanks are rapidly developing as they provide useful information for the management of complex diseases, such as melanoma. Indeed, melanoma, given its highly heterogeneous characteristics, is one of the oncologic diseases with the greatest clinical and therapeutic management complexity. So, the possibility of extrapolating tissue, genetic and imaging data from dedicated biobanks could result in more selective study approaches. In this review, we specifically analyze the several biobank types to evaluate their role in technology development, patient monitoring and research of new biomarkers, especially in the melanoma context.

Precision medicine has driven a major change in the treatment of many forms of cancer. The discovery that each patient is different and each tumor mass has its own characteristics has shifted the focus of basic and clinical research to the singular individual. Liquid biopsy (LB), in this sense, presents new scenarios in personalized medicine through the study of molecules, factors, and tumor biomarkers in blood such as circulating tumor cells (CTCs), circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), exosomes and circulating tumor microRNAs (ct-miRNAs). Moreover, its easy application and complete absence of contraindications for the patient make this method applicable in a great many fields. Melanoma, given its highly heterogeneous characteristics, is a cancer form that could significantly benefit from the information linked to liquid biopsy, especially in the treatment management. In this review, we will focus our attention on the latest applications of liquid biopsy in metastatic melanoma and possible developments in the clinical setting.