Cultivation of circulating tumor cells in esophageal cancer

Abstract

Abstract:The presence of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in patients with metastatic carcinoma is generally associated with poor clinical outcome. There have been many investigations showing a possible use of CTCs as minimally invasive predictive and prognostic biomarker in cancer medicine. In this report a size-based method (MetaCell ® ) for quick and easy enrichment and cultivation of CTCs is presented to enable possible CTCs use in esophageal cancer (EC) management. In total, 43 patients with diagnosed EC, 20 with adenocarcinoma (Adeno Ca) and 23 with squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), were enrolled into the adaptive prospective-like study. All the patients were candidates for surgery. The CTCs were detected in 27 patients (62.8%), with a higher rate in adenocarcinoma (75%) than SCC (52%). Finally, there were 26 patients with resectable tumors exhibiting CTCs-positivity in 69.2% and 17 patients with non-resectable tumors with 41.7% CTCs-positivity. Interestingly, in the patients undergoing neoadjuvant therapy, the CTCs were detected at time of surgery in 55.5% (10/18). The overall size-based filtration approach enabled to isolate viable CTCs and evaluate to their cytomorphological features by means of vital fluorescent staining. The CTCs were cultured in vitro for further downstream applications including immunohistochemical analysis. This is the first report of the successful culturing of esophageal cancer CTCs. The detection of CTCs presence could help in the future to guide timing of surgical treatment in

Detection of circulating tumor cells in patients with esophagogastric or pancreatic adenocarcinoma using the CellSearch® system: An observational feasibility study

“…The isolation by size of epithelial tumors technique, which is based on the filtration of cellular blood components through a membrane microfilter device (29), was able to detect CTCs originating from pancreatic adenocarcinomas not only more frequently, but also at higher numbers than the CellSearch ® system [frequency, 93 vs. 40%; median, 9 CTCs/7.5 ml of blood (range, 0-240) vs. 0 CTCs/7.5 ml of blood (range, 0-144, respectively) (30). Similar findings were reported for CTCs from esophagogastric adenocarcinoma, where another size-based enrichment method (MetaCell ® ) was able to detect CTCs in 15 out of 20 patients (75.0%) (31).…”

“…Therefore, the feasibility of the CellSearch ® system for this particular type of cancer remains questionable at this point. Recent studies in combination with the results from the present study suggest that size-based filtration methods may be superior to the CellSearch ® method for the detection of CTCs in patients with esophagogastric cancer (31).…”

Circulating tumor cells in different stages of colorectal cancer

“…The standard 8 mL peripheral blood sample from patients suffering from CRC was transferred into the filtration tube. Detailed separation protocol has been described previously [8][9][10]. The CTCs were grown in RPMI medium with 10% fetal blood serum (FBS, both purchased from Sigma-Aldrich, St. Louis, MO, USA) for a minimum of 3 days on the membrane.…”

Circulating Tumor Cells as an Auxiliary Diagnostic Tool in Surgery

“…The opportunity to detect tumor cells in the bloodstream before the clinical evidence of distant overt metastasis has been of interest for several decades (2-4). As we previously reported in our work, the presence of CTCs does not correspond with the TNM stage of disease, and for many tumor types, CTCs can be detected in early stages of disease (6)(7)(8). We found that 66.7% of patients with pancreatic cancer undergoing surgery had CTCs in their PB.…”

“…The presence of CTCs in PB is in general associated with a relatively shorter overall survival (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(7)(8)(9). Capturing CTCs from blood has been assigned as a 'liquid biopsy'.…”