A key issue with cancers that continue to have lower patient survivability rates, such as lung cancer, cervical cancer and colorectal cancer, is that they are often not diagnosed until later stages. Many times this means that cancer is not diagnosed until after it has metastasized, or spread to other organs and tissues. These cancers typically don’t cause symptoms until the later stages, thus patients aren’t being screened or tested early enough.
If a patient is determined to be at high-risk for a particular cancer, often due to medical history and lifestyle factors, they can be selected for early screening for Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs). These cells can be present in the bloodstream years before some cancers reach late stage. This is a critical finding for predictive oncology, as they point to the ability to determine which patients can benefit from further testing. For instance, a recent INSERM study, “Sentinel Circulating Tumor Cells Allow Early Diagnosis of Lung Cancer in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease,” showed that the ISET by Rarecells CTC detection system was used to successfully screen patients at high risk for developing lung cancer – COPD patients and smokers. Finding CTCs in the patients in these studies led to early diagnosis of lung cancer within 1-4 years.
The ISET by Rarecells CTC detection system is a cytopathological approach – meaning that it relies on diagnostic morphological identification of tumor cells. While biomarker testing can often result in false-positives, the ISET testing has virtually no false-positive rate. It also highly sensitive, allowing for extremely accurate results. CTC isolated without loss by ISET and diagnosed reliably by ISET-cytopathology are called Circulating Cancer Cells (CCC; Paterlini Bréchot, Cancer Microenvironment, 2014). The identification of CCC allows to make very early diagnosis of invasive solid cancer, before they become detectable by imaging, giving the patients the best chance to eradicate their cancer.
Detection of CCCs, as shown in the recent study noted earlier, is critical to predictive oncology and utilizing an approach that identifies CCCs present in at-risk patients could be the key to reducing mortality rates for these deadly cancers.