Nanostructured substrates for isolation of circulating tumor cells

Abstract

Summary Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) originate from the primary tumor mass and enter into the peripheral bloodstream. CTCs hold the key to understanding the biology of metastasis and also play a vital role in cancer diagnosis, prognosis, disease monitoring, and personalized therapy. However, CTCs are rare in blood and hard to isolate. Additionally, the viability of CTCs can easily be compromised under high shear stress while releasing them from a surface. The heterogeneity of CTCs in biomarker expression makes their isolation quite challenging; the isolation efficiency and specificity of current approaches need to be improved. Nanostructured substrates have emerged as a promising biosensing platform since they provide better isolation sensitivity at the cost of specificity for CTC isolation. This review discusses major challenges faced by CTC isolation techniques and focuses on nanostructured substrates as a platform for CTC isolation.

Detection of circulating tumor cells in prostate cancer based on carboxylated graphene oxide modified light addressable potentiometric sensor

“…Nanomaterials (e.g. nanoparticles, nanowires, and nanotubes) provide exciting new opportunities to improve CTCs detection efficiency (Lu et al, 2013;Wang et al, 2013). Graphene oxide (GO), a promising precursor of graphene, offers great potential for biological sensing because of its unique characteristics such as facile surface modification, good water dispersibility, and photoluminescence (Jung et al, 2010).…”

Detection and Clinical Significance of Circulating Tumor Cells in Colorectal Cancer—20 Years of Progress

“…Furthermore, single LGR5+ cells from the base of small intestinal crypts were found to be capable of initiating growth of crypt-like structures in culture (53). Recently plastin 3 (PLS3) overexpression in CTCs has been reported to induce EMT+ CTCs, and the detection of such cells in a large set of patients with CRC was an independent prognostic factor for PFS and OS; furthermore, the PLS3+ CTCs retained prognostic significance in the cells (reviewed in [62] and [63]). Recently our group has described the use of nanoroughened polystyrene tissue-culture plates for the capture of CTCs from blood following lysis of red blood cells.…”

Rational Design of Materials Interface for Efficient Capture of Circulating Tumor Cells

“…Although promising results have been achieved by these interfaces in terms of capture efficiency and detection sensitivity, most of them still remain in the laboratory level and little of them unequivocally shows clinical validity and utility 124. Heterogeneity among CTCs is a problem that cannot be ignored for CTCs isolation.…”