Circulating tumor cells in HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer patients: a valuable prognostic and predictive biomarker

Journal article

The majority of cancer-related deaths occur subsequent to the development of metastatic disease. This highly lethal disease stage is associated with the presence of circulating tumor cells (CTCs). These rare cells have been demonstrated to be of clinical significance in metastatic breast, prostate, and colorectal cancers. The current gold standard in clinical CTC detection and enumeration is the FDA-cleared CellSearch system (CSS). This manuscript outlines the standard protocol utilized by this platform as well as two additional adapted protocols that describe the detailed process of user-defined marker optimization for protein characterization of patient CTCs and a comparable protocol for CTC capture in very low volumes of blood, using standard CSS reagents, for studying in vivo preclinical mouse models of metastasis. In addition, differences in CTC quality between healthy donor blood spiked with cells from tissue culture versus patient blood samples are highlighted. Finally, several commonly discrepant items that can lead to CTC misclassification errors are outlined. Taken together, these protocols will provide a useful resource for users of this platform interested in preclinical and clinical research pertaining to metastasis and CTCs

Authors: Liu, Y; Liu, Q; Wang, T; Bian, L; Zhang, S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: BioMed Central
• Journal: BMC Cancer
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 202-202
• Publication date: 2013-04-23
• DOI: 10.1186/1471-2407-13-202
• EISSN: 1471-2407
• ISSN: 1471-2407
• Language: English
• Keywords: Internal medicine; Breast cancer; Medicine; Overall survival; Progression-free survival; Oncology; Metastatic breast cancer; Metastasis; Cancer; HER2 negative; Surgical oncology; Immunohistochemistry; Circulating tumor cell; Biomarker; Predictive value