Total microfluidic platform strategy for liquid biopsy

A liquid biopsy is a simple and non-invasive biopsy that examines a range of information about a tumor through a simple blood sample. Due to its non-invasive nature, liquid biopsy has many outstanding clinical benefits, including repetitive sampling and examination, representation of whole mutations, observation of minimal residual disease etc. However, liquid biopsy requires various processes such as sample preparation, amplification, and target detection. These processes can be integrated onto microfluidic platforms, which may provide a sample-to-answer system. The present review provides a brief overview of liquid biopsies, a detailed review of the technologies in each process, and prospective concluding remarks. Through this review, one can have a basic but cross-disciplinary understanding of liquid biopsy, as well as knowledge of new starting points for future research in each related area.