Circulating tumour cell detection: a direct comparison between the CellSearch System, the AdnaTest and CK-19/mammaglobin RT–PCR in patients with metastatic breast cancer

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The detection, enumeration and isolation of circulating tumour cells (CTCs) have considerable potential to influence the clinical management of patients with breast cancer. There is, however, substantial variability in the rates of positive samples using existing detection techniques. The lack of standardisation of technology hampers the implementation of CTC measurement in clinical routine practice. METHODS: This study was designed to directly compare three techniques for detecting CTCs in blood samples taken from 76 patients with metastatic breast cancer (MBC) and from 20 healthy controls: the CellSearch CTC System, the AdnaTest Breast Cancer Select/ Detect and a previously developed real-time qRT-PCR assay for the detection of CK-19 and mammaglobin transcripts. RESULTS: As a result, 36% of patients with MBC were positive by the CellSearch System, 22% by the AdnaTest, 26% using RT -PCR for CK-19 and 54% using RT -PCR for mammaglobin. Samples were significantly more likely to be positive for at least one mRNA marker using RT -PCR than using the CellSearch System (P ¼ 0.001) or the AdnaTest (Po0.001). CONCLUSION: We observed a substantial variation in the detection rates of CTCs in blood from breast cancer patients using three different techniques. A higher rate of positive samples was observed using a combined qRT-PCR approach for CK-19 and mammaglobin, which suggests that this is currently the most sensitive technique for detecting CTCs.

Comparison of three distinct methods for the detection of circulating tumor cells in colorectal cancer patients

“…It is well known that the pcr assays show a higher sensitivity compared to the cytofluorometric approach. In fact, a recent paper by Van der Auwera et al (33) showed that in patients with metastatic breast cancer, the ctc positive rate was higher when a qrt-pcr approach for the detection of cK19 and mammoglobin was used compared to other systems like cellsearch or Adnagen, approved ctc detection method. In our population sample, the highest rate of positive samples was observed using the rt-pcr approach (75% positive samples).…”

“…In order to identify the most effective way to detect ctcs, a few studies compared different enrichment techniques and methods for detection of ctcs in the blood of breast cancer (33,34), prostate cancer (35) and other metastatic carcinoma patients (36,37), sometimes showing concordance in results between methods of analysis or variation in ctc detection rates due to the higher sensitivity of the molecular methodology utilized in the analysis (33,34).…”

Real-time RT-PCR systems for CTC detection from blood samples of breast cancer and gynaecological tumour patients (Review)

“…The detection of viable CTCs by a detection of epithelial or tumour specific mRNAs by qRT-PCR is one of the most widely used techniques in the CTC-research field (74)(75)(76)(77)(78). QRT-PCR is the abbreviation for quantitative (real-time) reverse transcription PCR (79), which means that RNA is isolated from the tissue of interest (blood or fraction of a blood sample), is converted to cDNA by a reverse transcriptase reaction, which is then used in a real-time PCR reaction.…”

Circulating tumor cells and their relationship with clinical and morphological characteristics of colorectal cancer

“…Несмотря на длительную историю изу-чения и совершенствования методологи-ческих подходов [1], вопрос об участии циркулирующих опухолевых клеток (ЦОК) в прогрессировании злокачественного про-цесса остаётся актуальным до настояще-го времени.…”