New circulating tumor cell technology could advance personalized medicine in prostate cancer
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the University of California collaborate to develop enhanced tumor cell technology.
A newly enhanced device has been demonstrated to be effective at detecting and isolating single circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from the bloodstream of patients with prostate cancer. It is hoped that this development could pave the way for conducting next-generation sequencing on single CTCs in a step towards more personalized treatment schedules prostate cancer.
Analysis of CTCs would allow doctors to understand tumor evolution in each individual and to respond to any changes by altering the patient’s treatment plan for the most effective outcome. This ‘liquid biopsy’ would be a welcome alternative to the currently used invasive tissue biopsies. In addition, metastatic prostate cancer often spreads to bone where tissue availability for biopsy is minimal.
The new diagnostic technology is an enhanced form of the NanoVelcro Chip device, which was previously developed by Hsian-Rong Tseng (associate professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at the University of California, Los Angeles [CA, USA]). “To date, CTC capture technologies have been able to do little more than count the number of CTCs, which is informative but not very useful from a treatment planning perspective. It is a scientific breakthrough to have the ability to isolate pure CTCs and maintain their integrity for sophisticated genomic and behavioral analyses,” explained Tseng.
The newly enhanced version has been developed by a research team jointly led by Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (CA, USA) and the University of California, Los Angeles. The new system includes the NanoVelcro chip for capturing the CTCs from the patient’s blood; laser-capture microdissection for the cutting out and picking up the CTCs from the chip to avoid contamination from any white blood cells; and whole-exome sequencing of the CTC’s genetic material to reveal any mutations which could be used to guide therapy choices.
“This advancement will, in principle, allow us to track the genomic evolution of prostate cancer after we initiate a therapy and will allow us to better understand the mechanism of drug resistance that is common in prostate cancer patients,” explained one of the study’s first authors, Yi-Tsung Lu (postdoctoral scientist at the Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute [CA, USA]).
The recent study’s senior author, Edwin Posadas (medical director of the Urologic Oncology Program at the same cancer institute), is optimistic that their new CTC technology could bring great changes to prostate cancer treatment: “This evolution means that we need to be able to monitor these changes over time and to ensure a patient’s treatment is individualized and optimized. The molecular characterizations of CTCs will provide real-time information allowing us to choose the right treatment for the right patient at the right time. This improvement will be a great step toward developing personalized medicine,” he concluded.
Sources: New diagnostic technology may lead to individualized treatments for prostate cancer; Zhao L, Lu YT, Li F et al. High-purity prostate circulating tumor cell isolation by a polymer nanofiber-embedded microchip for whole exome sequencing. Adv. Mater. doi:10.1002/adma.201205237 (2013) (Epub ahead of print).
