scholarly journals Position of Circulating Tumor Cells in the Clinical Routine in Prostate Cancer and Breast Cancer Patients

Cancers ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 3782
Author(s):  
Gerit Theil ◽  
Paolo Fornara ◽  
Joanna Bialek
Keyword(s):  
Breast Cancer ◽  
Prostate Cancer ◽  
Tumor Cells ◽  
Circulating Tumor Cells ◽  
Therapeutic Response ◽  
Clinical Diagnostics ◽  
Breast Cancer Patients ◽  
Clinical Routine ◽  
The Past ◽  
Isolation And Characterization

Prostate cancer and breast cancer are the most common cancers worldwide. Anti-tumor therapies are long and exhaustive for the patients. The real-time monitoring of the healing progression could be a useful tool to evaluate therapeutic response. Blood-based biosources like circulating tumor cells (CTCs) may offer this opportunity. Application of CTCs for the clinical diagnostics could improve the sequenced screening, provide additional valuable information of tumor dynamics, and help personalized management for the patients. In the past decade, CTCs as liquid biopsy (LB) has received tremendous attention. Many different isolation and characterization platforms are developed but the clinical validation is still missing. In this review, we focus on the clinical trials of circulating tumor cells that have the potential to monitor and stratify patients and lead to implementation into clinical practice.

scholarly journals Technical Challenges for CTC Implementation in Breast Cancer

Cancers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (18) ◽  
pp. 4619
Author(s):  
Rocío Ramos-Medina ◽  
Sara López-Tarruella ◽  
María del Monte-Millán ◽  
Tatiana Massarrah ◽  
Miguel Martín
Keyword(s):  
Breast Cancer ◽  
Tumor Cells ◽  
Circulating Tumor Cells ◽  
Tumor Heterogeneity ◽  
Metastatic Breast ◽  
Circulating Tumor Cell ◽  
Circulating Tumor Dna ◽  
Breast Cancer Patients ◽  
Isolation And Characterization

Breast cancer is the most common neoplasm in women worldwide. Tissue biopsy, currently the gold standard to obtain tumor molecular information, is invasive and might be affected by tumor heterogeneity rendering it incapable to portray the complete dynamic picture by the absence of specific genetic changes during the evolution of the disease. In contrast, liquid biopsy can provide unique opportunities for real-time monitoring of disease progression, treatment response and for studying tumor heterogeneity combining the information of DNA that tumors spread in the blood (circulating tumor DNA) with CTCs analysis. In this review, we analyze the technical and biological challenges for isolation and characterization of circulating tumor cells from breast cancer patients. Circulating tumor cell (CTC) enumeration value is included in numerous clinical studies due to the prognostic’s role of these cells. Despite this, there are so many questions pending to answer. How to manage lymphocytes background, how to distinguish the CTCs subtypes or how to work with frozen samples, are some of the issues that will discuss in this review. Based on our experience, we try to address these issues and other technical limitations that should be solved to optimize the standardization of protocols, sample extraction procedures, circulating-tumor material isolation (CTCs vs. ctDNA) and the very diverse methodologies employed, aiming to consolidate the use of CTCs in the clinic. Furthermore, we think that new approaches focusing on isolation CTCs in other body fluids such as cerebrospinal or ascitic fluid are necessary to increase the opportunities of circulating tumor cells in the practice clinic as well as to study the promising role of CTC clusters and their prognostic value in metastatic breast cancer.

scholarly journals The Mechanical Fingerprint of Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) in Breast Cancer Patients

Cancers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 1119
Author(s):  
Ivonne Nel ◽  
Erik W. Morawetz ◽  
Dimitrij Tschodu ◽  
Josef A. Käs ◽  
Bahriye Aktas
Keyword(s):  
Breast Cancer ◽  
Cancer Cells ◽  
Cancer Patients ◽  
Tumor Cells ◽  
Circulating Tumor Cells ◽  
Hematopoietic Cells ◽  
Surrogate Marker ◽  
Clinical Samples ◽  
Breast Cancer Patients ◽  
Shape Restoration

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are a potential predictive surrogate marker for disease monitoring. Due to the sparse knowledge about their phenotype and its changes during cancer progression and treatment response, CTC isolation remains challenging. Here we focused on the mechanical characterization of circulating non-hematopoietic cells from breast cancer patients to evaluate its utility for CTC detection. For proof of premise, we used healthy peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), human MDA-MB 231 breast cancer cells and human HL-60 leukemia cells to create a CTC model system. For translational experiments CD45 negative cells—possible CTCs—were isolated from blood samples of patients with mamma carcinoma. Cells were mechanically characterized in the optical stretcher (OS). Active and passive cell mechanical data were related with physiological descriptors by a random forest (RF) classifier to identify cell type specific properties. Cancer cells were well distinguishable from PBMC in cell line tests. Analysis of clinical samples revealed that in PBMC the elliptic deformation was significantly increased compared to non-hematopoietic cells. Interestingly, non-hematopoietic cells showed significantly higher shape restoration. Based on Kelvin–Voigt modeling, the RF algorithm revealed that elliptic deformation and shape restoration were crucial parameters and that the OS discriminated non-hematopoietic cells from PBMC with an accuracy of 0.69, a sensitivity of 0.74, and specificity of 0.63. The CD45 negative cell population in the blood of breast cancer patients is mechanically distinguishable from healthy PBMC. Together with cell morphology, the mechanical fingerprint might be an appropriate tool for marker-free CTC detection.

A novel approach using telomerase-specific replication-selective adenovirus for detection of circulating tumor cells in breast cancer patients

2011 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 765-773 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seung Jin Kim ◽  
Akinori Masago ◽  
Yasuhiro Tamaki ◽  
Kenji Akazawa ◽  
Fumine Tsukamoto ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Breast Cancer ◽  
Cancer Patients ◽  
Tumor Cells ◽  
Circulating Tumor Cells ◽  
Breast Cancer Patients ◽  
Novel Approach

Circulating Tumor Cells in HER-2 Positive Metastatic Breast Cancer Patients Treated with Trastuzumab and Chemotherapy

2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raquel A. Nunes ◽  
Xiaochun Li ◽  
Soonmo Peter Kang ◽  
Harold Burstein ◽  
Lisa Roberts ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Breast Cancer ◽  
Metastatic Breast Cancer ◽  
Treatment Response ◽  
Cancer Patients ◽  
Tumor Cells ◽  
Circulating Tumor Cells ◽  
Peripheral Blood ◽  
Metastatic Breast ◽  
Breast Cancer Patients ◽  
Her 2

The detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in peripheral blood may have important prognostic and predictive implications in breast cancer treatment. A limitation in this field has been the lack of a validated method of accurately measuring CTCs. While sensitivity has improved using RT-PCR, specificity remains a major challenge. The goal of this paper is to present a sensitive and specific methodology of detecting CTCs in women with HER-2-positive metastatic breast cancer, and to examine its role as a marker that tracks disease response during treatment with trastuzumab-containing regimens. The study included patients with HER-2-positive metastatic breast cancer enrolled on two different clinical protocols using a trastuzumab-containing regimen. Serial CTCs were measured at planned time points and clinical correlations were made. Immunomagnetic selection of circulating epithelial cells was used to address the specificity of tumor cell detection using cytokeratin 19 (CK19). In addition, the extracellular domain of the HER-2 protein (HER-2/ECD) was measured to determine if CTCs detected by CK19 accurately reflect tumor burden. The presence of CTCs at first restaging was associated with disease progression. We observed an association between CK19 and HER-2/ECD. The association of HER-2/ECD with clinical response followed a similar pattern to that seen with CK19. Finally, the absence of HER-2/ECD at best overall response and a change of HER-2/ECD from positive at baseline to negative at best overall response was associated with favorable treatment response. Our study supports the prognostic and predictive role of the detection of CTCs in treatment of HER-2-positive metastatic breast cancer patients. The association between CK19 and markers of disease burden is in line with the concept that CTCs may be a reliable measure of tumor cells in the peripheral blood of patients with metastatic breast cancer. The association of CTCs at first restaging with treatment failure indicates that CTCs may have a role as surrogate markers to monitor treatment response.

scholarly journals Feasibility of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) combined with medical imaging examinations to screen for cancer and improve diagnosis in non-metastatic invasive breast cancer patients: a cohort study

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuan Shao ◽  
xiao yan jin ◽  
zhi gang chen ◽  
zhi gang zhang ◽  
ke wang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Breast Cancer ◽  
Medical Imaging ◽  
Tumor Cells ◽  
Circulating Tumor Cells ◽  
Breast Imaging ◽  
Chinese Women ◽  
Clinicopathological Characteristics ◽  
Breast Cancer Patients ◽  
Detection Rates ◽  
Gamma Imaging

Abstract Background: Previous study has reported that circulating tumor cells (CTCs) could be served as a diagnostic biomarker in breast cancer (BC) screening. However, the differential efficacy of routine examination including ultrasound (US), mammogram (MG), magnetic resonance imaging (MR), and breast-specific gamma imaging (BSGI) and CTCs is unknown. This study aimed to compare CTCs with common used BC screening imaging modalities and to evaluate whether their combination would enhance the diagnostic potency in non-metastatic BC patients.Methods: 102 treatment-naive non-metastatic BC patients, 177 patients with breast benign diseases (BBD) and 64 healthy females, who had CTC detection and at least one of the following medical imaging examinations, US, MG or MR between December 2017 and November 2018, were enrolled in this study.Correlations of CTC enumeration with patients’ clinicopathological characteristics and medical imaging examinations were evaluated. Results: CTC detection rates (average CTC counts) in stage I-III BC patients were 92.9% (2.1), 87.2% (2.4) and 100% (4.2), respectively. CTCs counts were positively associated with cancer stage (p = 0.0084) and tumor size (p = 0.0301). CTC counts were more correlated with US than MR or MG. CTC counts were not associated with molecular subtypes of BC nor breast-specific gamma imaging (BSGI) results, indicating that CTC enumeration cannot be used to predict molecular signatures of BC. CTCs and medical imaging examinations would have the best diagnostic performance for BC when CTC cut-off was set to 2 and imaging Breast Imaging-Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS) was set to 4b. Combination of CTC with US, MG or MR increased the sensitivity for BC diagnosis, especially for MG. Sensitivity of MG increased from 0.694 to 0.917, even more than in conjugation with US (0.901). Conclusion: CTCs counts can be used as a diagnostic aid in BC screening and early diagnosis. CTCs counts were more relevant to US than MR or MG. Conjugation of CTCs counts would improve the diagnostic potency of medical imaging examinations for diagnosing BC, especially for MG in Chinese women.

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