AsianScientist (Jan. 14, 2015) – A paper published in the journal ACS Nano describes an improved method for safely extracting and analyzing circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in the blood of patients. The international team of researchers including scientists from Academia Sinica, RIKEN and the Sun Yat-Sen University have also demonstrated the utility of their method for monitoring non-small cell lung cancer patients.
CTCs are cancer cells that break away from tumors and travel in the blood, looking for places in the body to start growing new tumors called metastases. Capturing these rare cells allows doctors to detect and analyze a patient’s cancer to give insight into personalized treatment design for each patient.
Based at the Smart Organic Materials Laboratory at Academia Sinica, Yu Hsiao-hua, Associate Research Fellow of the Institute of Chemistry has developed a way to capture CTCs from blood samples—a liquid biopsy—and then release them from the surface with great cell viability using an invention called the Nano Velcro chip. This allows the scientists to examine the CTCs and analyze their genetic features.
The Thermoresponsive Nano Velcro CTC purification system allowed the researchers to raise the temperature (37°C), causing the cells to adhere, and then lower it to release them. This method makes the process for extracting CTCs much more efficient and cost-effective.
Moreover, they demonstrated that their mutational genetic analysis was able to monitor the disease evolution of a lung cancer patient. This shows the translational value of the device in managing non-small cell lung cancer with underlying mutations.
“Cancer cells are constantly changing with the microenvironment. Therefore it is difficult to manage and track their molecular biological status. With our new system we can control the temperature like an espresso machine for blood to capture then release the target cells,” said Yu.
“The downstream cellular mutational analysis will reveal information about the cancer status. As a result, the information will lead to a cancer GPS system to detect cancers with underlying mutations, locate their status in the complex cancer-biology map, and subsequently guide medical treatments”
The article can be found at: Ke et al. (2015) Programming Thermoresponsiveness of NanoVelcro Substrates Enables Effective Purification of Circulating Tumor Cells in Lung Cancer Patients.
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Source: Academia Sinica; Photo: Shutterstock.
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