Association Between Circulating Tumor Cells and Prognosis in Patients With Stage III Melanoma With Sentinel Lymph Node Metastasis in a Phase III International Multicenter Trial

Abstract

CTC biomarker status is a prognostic factor for recurrence-free survival, distant metastasis disease-free survival, and MSS after CLND in patients with SLN metastasis. This multimarker RT-qPCR analysis may therefore be useful in discriminating patients who may benefit from aggressive adjuvant therapy or stratifying patients for adjuvant clinical trials.

Detection of Circulating Tumour Cells and Survival of Patients with Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

“…Hence, epithelial expression-based methods such as the CellSearch device, may have a disadvantage (despite being the only FDA approved CTC isolation device) over expressionindependant, filtration-type platforms such as ISET (RareCells, Paris, France) or ScreenCell which rely on cell size and other physical cellular properties. There are a multitude devices available on the market, with varying functionality (19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25) The CTC detection rate by ScreenCell in our study, was higher compared to similar studies looking at patients with early-stage NSCLC. Freidin et al (2014) reported CTC detection rates of 56% and 65% by two separate pathologists using ScreenCell in patients undergoing surgery for early-stage lung cancer in comparison to 78.3% (N=15) and 73.9% (N=14) detection rates in our study (Table II) (26).…”

Genome-Wide Characterization of Circulating Tumor Cells Identifies Novel Prognostic Genomic Alterations in Systemic Melanoma Metastasis

“…Furthermore, tumor tissue may not always be available for analysis, particularly when metastases are small or when biopsy or surgery is not technically feasible. CTC can provide a real-time evaluation of subclinical melanoma spread and a method for monitoring patient response to therapy (1,6,29 ). The study of genomic aberrations in CTC may provide insight into genomic characteristics and mechanisms by which tumor cells establish distant organ metastasis and lead to the development of strategies to target CTC to prevent or control systemic melanoma metastasis.…”

Circulating Tumor Cells, DNA, and mRNA: Potential for Clinical Utility in Patients With Melanoma

“…Since this technique was first described by Smith et al in 1991, using tyrosinase mRNA PCR analysis, several additional candidate mRNA biomarkers have been proposed, including [56,57]. However, research groups tend to agree on the basic principles of the technique.…”

“…The primary strength of mRNA analysis is its ease of acquisition and scalability (Table 1). reverse transcriptase PCR studies have already been successfully embedded in international multicenter clinical trials involving more than 1,000 patients in total [54,56,57]. However, mRNA analysis has not yet been used to identify key genetic abnormalities in melanoma, such as BRAF, c-Kit, and PTEN (phosphatase and tensin homolog).…”

“…200), results should be interpreted with caution, as these studies pooled patients from both arms of multicenter therapeutic clinical trials. Thus, the OS and PFS rates may not be reflective of prognoses expected with standard treatment [55][56][57].…”