A recent report addressing the correlation between EMT-marker expression in CTCs and breast cancer progression encourages future studies regarding the expression of EMT-related markers in CTCs and cancer progression.
Our results show that 100% of clonal mutations in patient BM were detected in CTCs and that 99% of clonal mutations in CTCs were present in BM MM.
Recently developed RNA in situ hybridization (RNAish) technique (Affymetrix, Santa Clara, CA, USA) demonstrated its capability for visible identifying mRNA in CTCs.
We next evaluated HER2 status in CTCs from 38 patients with advanced metastatic breast cancer.
We sought to determine whether a HER2 FISH assay could be reliably used to detect HER2 amplification in CTCs.
Although, evaluation of EGFR expression in CTCs has been described previously, the data in our report is notably different.
We observed generally excellent agreement between EGFR staining in CTCs and EGFR levels determined by IHC on cell pellets.
Potential miRNA biomarkers were also identified in CTCs.
Low frequency variants were higher in CTCs (p < 0.001).
Asparagine synthetase (ASNS) expression was also higher in CTCs.
ROS1-gene alterations observed in CTCs at baseline from ROS1-rearranged patients were compared with those present in tumor biopsies and in CTCs during crizotinib treatment.
