Direct detection of rare circulating tumor cells in peripheral blood mononuclear cells by scRNA seq: Spike-in strategy based feasibility study.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Circulating tumor cells (CTC) provide a minimally invasive window into metastatic disease but are difficult to detect and estimate due to their rarity and heterogeneity. Conventional enrichment-based approaches introduce selection bias and fail to capture diverse CTC populations. Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA seq) enables unbiased transcriptomic profiling of diverse cell types and rare population within complex samples like blood. Here, we evaluated feasibility of a computational spike-in framework to assess the sensitivity and specificity of scRNA seq based CTC detection in a peripheral blood background.

Methods

Three PBMC datasets comprising 20,871; 14,367; and 13,731 cells were created by merging Cell Ranger-derived raw matrices from 12 PBMC samples (4 per

SUBMITTER: Kumar S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12908076 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature