Clinicopathological and prognostic significance of circulating tumor cells in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Monitoring of circulating epithelial tumor cells using the Maintrac® method and its potential benefit for the treatment of patients with colorectal cancer

“…A longitudinal monitoring of their numbers and properties can provide valuable information on therapy response and disease progression. Various studies demonstrated a correlation between circulating tumor cells and metastases, survival and therapy response for patients with different types of cancer (14)(15)(16)(17)(18).…”

Exploration of Feasible Immune Biomarkers for Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma Treatment in Real World Clinical Practice

“…In addition to CTCs, ctDNA is another material with 150-200 bp fragment DNA released from the tumor cells undergoing apoptosis or necrosis into the blood [111][112][113]. Compared with tissue biopsy, which remains the gold standard in the diagnosis of solid malignancies, analysis of CTCs or ctDNA are emerging as an important diagnostic tool because of it being time-saving, non-invasive, cheaper and there is lower risk of cancer spreading [113][114][115][116]. In HNSCC, investigation of CTCs and ctDNA in different disease or treatment status has been considered as a predictive marker for diagnosis, prognosis and response to treatment [55,109,110,114,[117][118][119].…”

“…Compared with tissue biopsy, which remains the gold standard in the diagnosis of solid malignancies, analysis of CTCs or ctDNA are emerging as an important diagnostic tool because of it being time-saving, non-invasive, cheaper and there is lower risk of cancer spreading [113][114][115][116]. In HNSCC, investigation of CTCs and ctDNA in different disease or treatment status has been considered as a predictive marker for diagnosis, prognosis and response to treatment [55,109,110,114,[117][118][119]. Additionally, positive CTCs after major treatment are associated with an increased risk of distal metastasis in patients with localized HNSCC [120,121].…”

Enhancing Prediction Performance by Add-On Combining Circulating Tumor Cell Count, CD45neg EpCAMneg Cell Count on Colorectal Cancer, Advance, and Metastasis

“…Based on these scientific findings, a wide variety of clinical studies were carried out. Reports in the literature, for example, have demonstrated that cancer patients with a higher number of CTCs normally have a poorer prognosis than those with a lower number of CTCs [ 8 , 9 , 10 ]. Moreover, the predictive roles of CTCs for specific cancer therapies have also been demonstrated in different scenarios in patients with breast [ 11 ], head and neck [ 12 ], or prostate cancers [ 9 ].…”

“…Although the conventional CTC enumeration (e.g., CellSearch) approach and relevant assays have been successfully demonstrated for various clinical applications in oncology [ 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 ], there is an important biological issue that should be considered. As discussed earlier, most of the current CTC isolation or enumeration approaches primarily utilize the cellular surface antigen EpCAM for the identification of CTCs.…”