Five different studies have successfully established the effectiveness of a blood test used for discovering and evaluating circulating tumor cells (CTCs), according to scientists from The Scripps Research Institute, Scripps Health, and other collaborating cancer physicians. The findings, published February 3, 2012, in the journal Physical Biology, show the highly sensitive blood analysis provides information that may soon be compared to the information gleaned from some types of surgical biopsies.
“It’s a next-generation technology,” said Scripps Research associate professor, Peter Kuhn, PhD, senior investigator of the new studies and primary inventor of the high-definition blood test. “It significantly boosts our ability to monitor, predict, and understand cancer progression, including metastasis, which is the major cause of death for cancer patients.”
The new test, named HD-CTC, differentiates potential CTCs from ordinary red and white blood cells in a patient’s blood sample. Then, a digital microscope and an image-processing algorithm are used to separate the suspicious cells with different morphologies compared with those of healthy cells. Similar to a surgical biopsy, a pathologist can eliminate false-positives by examining the images of suspected CTCs and noting their morphologies.
The benefits of the 5 new test studies include:
- The evidence of the accuracy and effectiveness of the HD-CTC test for several different cancer types
- The exploration of the technology’s ability to diagnose and monitor patients with cancer
- The potential for improvements in cancer research in the lab
HD-CTC eliminates the typical “enrichment” steps in which other CTC tests concentrate suspected CTCs, yet the 5 studies show the new HD-CTC test works well as a no-cell-left-behind process and allows for a more complete analysis.
Researchers also note the quality of the images with the HD-CTC test. “The high definition method gives a detailed portrait of these elusive cells that are caught in the act of spreading around the body,” said diagnostic pathologist Kelly Bethel, MD, of Scripps Health, Scripps Research, and UC San Diego School of Medicine, who is the senior clinical investigator on Kuhn’s team. “It’s unprecedented – we’ve never been able to see them routinely and in high definition like this before.”
Future studies will focus on the use of HD-CTC as a potential screening test. Kuhn and his colleagues anticipate developing it further for use in clinical monitoring and cancer research.
Source: The Scripps Research Institute.