Isolation of circulating tumor cells

Jon F Edd; Avanish Mishra; Kyle C Smith; Ravi Kapur; Shyamala Maheswaran; Daniel A Haber; Mehmet Toner

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.104696

Isolation of circulating tumor cells

iScience. 2022 Jul 1;25(8):104696. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104696. eCollection 2022 Aug 19.

Authors

Jon F Edd^{1

2}, Avanish Mishra^{1

2

3}, Kyle C Smith⁴, Ravi Kapur^{1

4}, Shyamala Maheswaran^{2

3}, Daniel A Haber^{2

3

5}, Mehmet Toner^{1

3

6}

Affiliations

¹ BioMEMS Resource Center, Center for Engineering in Medicine and Surgical Services, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, USA.
² Cancer Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114, USA.
³ Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
⁴ BendBio, Inc., Sharon, MA 02067, USA.
⁵ Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Bethesda, MD 20815, USA.
⁶ Shriners Hospitals for Children, Boston, MA 02114, USA.

Abstract

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) enter the vasculature from solid tumors and disseminate widely to initiate metastases. Mining the metastatic-enriched molecular signatures of CTCs before, during, and after treatment holds unique potential in personalized oncology. Their extreme rarity, however, requires isolation from large blood volumes at high yield and purity, yet they overlap leukocytes in size and other biophysical properties. Additionally, many CTCs lack EpCAM that underlies much of affinity-based capture, complicating their separation from blood. Here, we provide a comprehensive introduction of CTC isolation technology, by analyzing key separation modes and integrated isolation strategies. Attention is focused on recent progress in microfluidics, where an accelerating evolution is occurring in high-throughput sorting of cells along multiple dimensions.

Keywords: Biotechnology; Cell biology; Technical aspects of cell biology.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

R01 CA129933/CA/NCI NIH HHS/United States