Typical and atypical circulating tumour cells in bladder cancer. Why improve our knowledge?

Liquid biopsy is the new rontier in cancer biology: easy to perorm at every stage o disease course, low invasive, and not painul, itlooks amazing. In this field can recognize two main characters: circulating tumour cells (CCs) and circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA).Tey can be considered as a patient’s individual tumour fingerprint, promising an easiest way to ollow cancer progression. akentogether they all seem bright and sparkle, in reality they find low application in clinics, especially in bladder cancer where only theCC count has been correlated to clinical outcomes. Since stage bladder cancer is difficult to manage due to chemotherapy resistance,recurrences and ew therapeutics protocols, we need to go over simply count o CCs, and use them to improve the patient’s managementtherapy and find potential new biomarkers or innovative pharmacological treatments. Here we provide an overview about the potentialemployment o CCs in clinics highlighting the relevance o non-clinically detectable CCs, named “atypical CCs”, which may beresponsible or recurrences and chemotherapy resistance.