Research Pushes CTC Characterization to Realize Clinical Value
High hopes abound for the anticipated clinical value of information garnered from circulating tumor cells (CTCs). However, despite plentiful encouraging early reports of ties between the presence of CTCs and clinicopathologic presentations in known cancer patients, more needs to be understood about the basic biology of CTCs and their presumed role in metastasis. Among the conceivable clinical applications of CTCs include their use as a noninvasive, real-time marker to predict disease progression; as a therapeutic management tool including as an evaluator of therapeutic effectiveness and drug resistance both in clinical practice and as a surrogate end point in clinical trials; as a component of tumor staging criteria; as a means to identify tissue of origin through expression profiling for detection of organ-specific metastatic signatures; and as a screening tool to identify early-stage cancer patients. “CTC genomics is still in its infancy, mainly due to a lack of technologies capable of isolating sufficient numbers of CTCs to analyze somatic mutations, and the lack of suitable material with which to compare results due to CTC heterogeneity,” writes lead author Vicki Plaks, from the University of California, San Francisco, in a perspective piece published in the Sept. 13 issue of Science. “The next […]
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