Classification of large circulating tumor cells isolated with ultra-high throughput microfluidic Vortex technology.

ABSTRACT: Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are emerging as rare but clinically significant non-invasive cellular biomarkers for cancer patient prognosis, treatment selection, and treatment monitoring. Current CTC isolation approaches, such as immunoaffinity, filtration, or size-based techniques, are often limited by throughput, purity, large output volumes, or inability to obtain viable cells for downstream analysis. For all technologies, traditional immunofluorescent staining alone has been employed to distinguish and confirm the presence of isolated CTCs among contaminating blood cells, although cells isolated by size may express vastly different phenotypes. Consequently, CTC definitions have been non-trivial, researcher-dependent, and evolving. Here we describe a complete set of objective criteria,

SUBMITTER: Che J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4914319 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature