Home > News > Isolation of Circulating Tumor Cells of All Types Without Loss is a Technical Challenge

Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) are cells from a primary tumor that shed into a patient’s bloodstream. These cells can often be detected years before a cancer reaches metastasis, the later stages of cancer in which it becomes more difficult to treat successfully. Detection of these cells in a patient’s blood can lead to diagnosis of cancer in stages 1 or 2, giving patients much better survivability odds.

 

While the medical community has known about CTCs for some time, there have been limitations with approved technologies and their ability to identify these cells with accuracy. Blood filtration to recover rare CTCs without loss and/or cell damage has been challenging. One technology that is proving its worth by successfully detecting CTCs is the ISET by Rarecells system. In a recent INSERM study, “Sentinel Circulating Tumor Cells Allow Early Diagnosis of Lung Cancer in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease,” the ISET by Rarecells CTC detection system was used to successfully screen patients at high risk for developing lung cancer – COPD patients and smokers. The system was able to identify a group of patients with CTCs, leading to an aggressive monitoring approach that helped to detect nascent, early-stage lung tumors within 1-4 years.

The ISET technology is based on the observation that tumor cells of all types of solid cancers are larger than blood cells, leukocytes and erythrocytes. The ISET test uses a specially designed device and specially designed filters and technology to allow the elimination of all erythrocytes and most leukocytes from the sample, making the subsequent cytopathology  process significantly easier and more accurate.

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.