Liquid Biopsy in Rare Cancers: Lessons from Hemangiopericytoma

Abstract

Hemangiopericytoma (HPT) is a rare mesenchymal tumor of fibroblastic type and for its rarity is poorly studied. The most common sites of metastatic disease in patients with intracranial HPT are the bone, liver, and lung, suggestive for an hematogenous dissemination; for this reason, we investigated, for the first time, the presence of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in hemangiopericytoma patient by CellSearch® and SceenCell® devices. Peripheral blood samples were drawn and processed by CellSearch, an EpCAM-dependent device, and ScreenCell®, a device size based. We found nontypical CTCs by CellSearch system and the immunofluorescence analysis performed on CTCs isolate by ScreenCell demonstrated the presence of single CTCs and CTC clusters. The molecular characterization of single CTCs and CTC clusters, using antibodies directed against EpCAM, CD34, cytokeratins (8, 18, and 19), and CD45, showed a great heterogeneity in CTC clusters. We believe that the present study may open a new scenario in the rare tumors: the introduction of the liquid biopsy and the molecular characterization of circulating tumor cells could lead to personalized targeted treatments and also for rare tumors.

ErbB3 Phosphorylation as Central Event in Adaptive Resistance to Targeted Therapy in Metastatic Melanoma: Early Detection in CTCs during Therapy and Insights into Regulation by Autocrine Neuregulin

“…In our samples we observed a very low proportion of white cells. As expected CTCs not showed the expression of CD45 receptor as compared to leucocytes (Figure S9B) [29,30].…”

Expression Profiling of Circulating Tumor Cells in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Patients: Biomarkers Predicting Overall Survival

“…Among the different technologies employed to isolate and purify CTCs, the ScreenCell® microfiltration is an epitope-independent size-based device, able to capture CTCs, both EPCAM positive and negative. It has been used in CTC identification in rare tumors like hemangiopericytoma (9) as well as in more common tumors such as non-small cell lung, bladder, prostate, head, and neck cancers (10–13) including PDAC (14).…”

Detection of circulating tumor cells in patients with laryngeal cancer using ScreenCell: Comparative pre- and post-operative analysis and association with prognosis

“…The development of semiautomatic technologies, such as the CellSearch system, has allowed evaluation of the prognostic role of CTC status in patients with other types of cancer, such as lung and breast cancer, with promising results (37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42)(43)(44)(45)(46)(47)(48)(49). A recent study from Chudasama et al (38) evaluated the efficacy of the ScreenCell filtration system, to capture, isolate and propagate CTCs from patients with primary lung cancer.…”