Background and objectives: Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) as a noninvasive detection technology have become a research hotspot in the field of precision medicine. However, CTC detection faces great challenges with respect to specificity and sensitivity.
Methods: We divided 39 subjects into three groups: renal carcinoma, renal stones and healthy persons. Using subtraction enrichment (SE) combined with immunostaining-fluorescence in situ hybridization technology, we identified and characterized CTCs. CTCs were identified as DAPI +/CD45-/PanCK + (-). We explored whether the number of CTCs was related to clinicopathological factors and their clinical application.
Results: The CTC count in the renal carcinoma group (29/39) was 86.20% using a cut-off value of 1 CTC, which was significantly higher than that of other technologies in detecting CTCs, demonstrating that SE-iFISH technology can be used for CTC detection. The CTC count was much higher in the renal carcinoma group than that in the other control groups, with an area under the ROC curve of 0.931 (95% confidence interval 0.851 to 1.000, P < 0.01). In addition, the tetraploid count on chromosome 8 of T4 stage renal carcinoma was much higher than that of other stages (T1-T3), which may suggest that tetraploid count could be a marker of renal carcinoma prognosis and influence treatment decisions for better clinical management.
Conclusions: Our study showed that SE-iFISH technology can be used to detect CTCs in renal carcinoma with high sensitivity and specificity. Therefore, the analysis of CTCs with SE-iFISH has clear potential to improve the management of patients with renal carcinoma.
Keywords: Circulating tumor cells (CTCs); Renal cancer; Subtraction enrichment combined with immunostaining-fluorescence in situ hybridization (SE-iFISH).