MINI REVIEW article
Front. Oncol.
Sec. Breast Cancer
Volume 15 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fonc.2025.1655415
This article is part of the Research TopicLiquid Biopsy and Circulating Tumor DNA Assays in the Management of Breast CancerView all 8 articles
Circulating DNA Tumor Fraction as a Biomarker for Advanced Breast Cancer
Provisionally accepted
- The Ohio State University, Columbus, United States
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Liquid biopsy has emerged as an important clinical tool for managing a range of tumor types, including advanced breast cancers. Early work in metastatic breast cancer (MBC) demonstrated that circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) could be reliably detected in patient peripheral blood samples. These discoveries laid the groundwork for more recent work monitoring the circulating DNA tumor fraction, which is the fraction of ctDNA among total cell-free DNA. Studies have shown tumor fraction to be a useful prognostic biomarker in advanced breast cancer. Clinical trials have also begun to explore tumor fraction's role in predicting response to specific therapeutic agents in MBC. Future investigation will be critical to understand when and how tumor fraction should inform clinical decision-making for breast cancer patients in a variety of settings, especially given the increasing accessibility of both commercial and research-based assays that report tumor fraction.
Keywords: liquid biopsy, breast cancer, Metastatic cancer, biomarker, Cancer
Received: 27 Jun 2025; Accepted: 22 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Cybulla and Stover. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Daniel Stover, daniel.stover@osumc.edu
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