To demonstrate the feasibility of CTC detection in patient blood, duplicate blood samples were drawn from 45 metastatic breast cancer patients for analysis by CTCscope and the CellSearch system.
CTC detection in vivo is a big challenge and can sample a much larger volume of blood compared to patient blood draws.
The anti-CK antibody-based CTC-enrichment method uses an intracellular CK protein marker to enrich CTCs and achieve better sensitivity of CTC detection than that of the surface EpCAM protein marker in blood samples from breast cancer patients.
Secondly, CTC detection at low numbers could be a prognostic marker for disease progression.
Importantly, other work suggests that EMT-CTCs may be more likely to evade classical CTC detection by the AdnaTest as a result of down-regulation of EpCAM.
blood samples per patient, method of CTC isolation and enrichment, molecular technique, target gene, and/or antigen used for CTC detection, in vitro sensitivity of each molecular method (if assessed), and no.
This allowed the direct comparison of the prognostic value of CTC detection to DTC detection.
The majority of CellSearch® images analyzed were from patients with M0 breast cancer, with <5 CTCs in their blood sample and from patients for whom blood sampling for CTC detection was performed before the administration of systemic treatment (Table 1).
Blood samples were subjected to CTC detection assay, and then detectable cells were counted by fluorescence microscopy.
Excluding the patients with breast cancer-related events before the sample collections, CTC detection was not significantly associated with disease-free survival/distant-disease-free survival, in contrast to DTC detection [ 17].
Further trials should therefore evaluate the clinical value of DTC/CTC enumeration in the neoadjuvant situation, especially as CTC detection offers the possibility of serial blood sampling during the course of therapy.
