Well, we’re back with more circulating tumor cell (CTC) news. This one comes from a new study published by UCLA scientists that describes a new technology to capture CTCs for analysis. The device is a silicon chip covered in nano-pillars coated with a special antibody to cause circulating tumor cells to stick. The chip can then be used with existing lab technology to analyze the collected tumor cells. The new device is faster and will hopefully be cheaper than similar existing technology.
Metastatic disease is usually identified by performing biopsies of solid metastatic tumors. This is often late in the disease, however, and it’s better to identify metastatic disease earlier (such as by detecting CTCs) so that treatment can possibly be more effective.
More info from the press release:
In a study published this month in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the UCLA team developed a 1-by-2-centimeter silicon chip that is covered with densely packed nanopillars and looks like a shag carpet. To test cell-capture performance, researchers incubated the nanopillar chip in a culture medium with breast cancer cells. As a control, they performed a parallel experiment with a cell-capture method that uses a chip with a flat surface. Both structures were coated with anti-EpCAM, an antibody protein that can help recognize and capture tumor cells.
The researchers found that the cell-capture yields for the UCLA nanopillar chip were significantly higher; the device captured 45 to 65 percent of the cancer cells in the medium, compared with only 4 to 14 percent for the flat device.
Read the press release here…
Read the abstract here…
CTC flashbacks: Microchips for Tumor Detection, CellTraffix Aims to Cleanse Blood of CA, Collect Stem Cells, Watching Circulating Tumor Cell Count Helps Predict Breast Cancer Development
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