fig1

Figure 1. Liquid biopsy may recapitulate the entire mutational complexity of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) patients. In every single DLBCL patient, the mutational profile of the lymphoma may vary in different anatomical sites. For instance, a DLBCL patient may harbor a EP300 and KMT2D mutation in the left axillary lymph node (in brown), a EP300, KMT2D and CD79b mutation in the right axillary lymph node (in red), a KMT2D and CD79b mutation in the right inguinal lymph node (in blue), and a KMT2D and TP53 mutation in a lymph node deep in the abdomen (in green). Consistently, if the biopsy targets a superficial lymph node (e.g., the left axillary lymph node; in brown), in order to avoid unnecessary surgical risks, a certain number of mutations (i.e., CD79b and TP53 mutation) present in the lymphoma genome would go undetected. Importantly, those mutations, if detected, might serve as predictive biomarkers as well as molecular markers allowing the monitoring of the disease during treatment. Conversely, cfDNA analysis on the liquid biopsy may overcome these limitations, since it is representative of all the different anatomical sites of the disease