Circulating Tumor Cells: February 2013

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Circulating tumor cells as a surrogate marker for determining clinical outcome to mFOLFOX chemotherapy in patients with stage III colon cancer

Circulating tumor cells as a surrogate marker fo... [Br J Cancer. 2013] - PubMed - NCBI
Background:This study was aimed to detect post-chemotherapeutic circulating tumour cells (CTCs) in stage III colon cancer patients and identify those who were at high risk of relapse.Methods:We used human telomerase reverse transcriptase, cytokeratin-19, cytokeratin-20, and carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) as the biomarkers to detect CTCs in 90 stage III colon cancer patients undergoing curative resection followed by mFOLFOX chemotherapy.Results:Post-chemotherapeutic relapse occurred in 30 (33.3%) patients. By univariate analysis and multivariate proportional hazards regression analysis, perineural invasion (hazard ratio (HR): 2.752; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.026-7.381), high post-chemotherapeutic serum CEA levels (HR: 2.895; 95% CI: 1.143-7.333) and persistent presence of post-chemotherapeutic CTCs (HR: 6.273; 95% CI: 2.442-16.117) were independent predictors of post-chemotherapeutic relapse. In addition, the persistent presence of post-chemotherapeutic CTCs strongly correlated with reduced disease-free survival and overall survival. Accuracy of detecting relapse in post-chemotherapeutic stage III colon cancer patients by analysing the persistent presence of post-chemotherapeutic CTCs was higher than that by post-chemotherapeutic CEA levels (odds ratio: 50.091 vs 5.211).Conclusion:The persistent presence of post-chemotherapeutic CTCs is a potential powerful surrogate marker for determining clinical outcome in stage III colon cancer patients receiving adjuvant mFOLFOX chemotherapy.British Journal of Cancer advance online publication, 19 February 2013; doi:10.1038/bjc.2012.595 www.bjcancer.com.

Cholesterol loading and ultrastable protein interactions determine the level of tumor marker required for optimal isolation of cancer cells

Cholesterol loading and ultrastable protein interactions determine the level of tumor marker required for optimal isolation of cancer cells

the authors also have a press release here about this paper

https://diigo.com/0x7cu

the key findings are

"Surface markers like EpCAM in the membrane of the cell are moving in a sea of lipids and cholesterol," explained Howarth. "Cholesterol plays an important role in the physical properties of the cell membrane, affecting its fluidity, elasticity and integrity. We found that the cell’s cholesterol level was crucial to how sensitively the cell could be isolated by the magnetic beads.

"Feeding cells extra cholesterol for an hour meant that even cells with low EpCAM levels were caught. It's worth bearing in mind that all of this is done to blood samples after they have been taken from the patient– we're not talking about pumping people full of cholesterol!"