The research team has established an approach for measuring patient-specific circulating and solid cell concordance by introducing tumor touch preparations to the High-Definition Single Cell Analysis workflow for high-resolution cytomorphometric characterization of metastatic colorectal cancer.
Combined with the association of circulating cells with tumor burden and necrosis of hepatic lesions, their overall findings demonstrate that liquid biopsy cells can be informative biomarkers in the mCRC setting.
Patient-specific level of concordance can readily be measured to establish the utility of circulating cells as biomarkers and define biosignatures for liquid biopsy assays.
Dr. Peter Kuhn from the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA said, "Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer globally."
To faithfully capture cell heterogeneity, personalized oncology is furthermore moving towards single cell profiling for more informed clinical decision making, as opposed to homogenized cell populations in conventional bulk biopsy analysis.
High-Definition Single Cell Analysis is a workflow for detailed characterization of circulating rare cells by high resolution imagery of individual cells.
By screening all nucleated cells within a sample, it is a "no cell left behind" approach enabling both increased sensitivity compared to most other CTC assays, as well as inherent morphometric profiling of all candidate tumor cells.
With an earlier version of the workflow, a case study of CTCs and primary cells from lung cancer concluded that a subset of CTCs displayed similar cytomorphology to a subset of primary tumor cells, even though the solid biopsy had been collected years prior to the CTCs.
Based on the current HD-SCA workflow, which includes a more detailed digital analysis of candidate cells and allows for incorporating solid biopsy single cell analysis, the authors set out to establish an approach for quantitative correlation analysis of liquid and solid biopsy cells based on high-content morphometric analysis on the single-cell level.
The Kuhn Research Team concluded that while the study was limited by the current lack of genomic and/or multiplex proteomic single-cell data, the morphometric characterization of >1000 single cells supports that liquid biopsy cells are related to solid tumor cells in mCRC, and that subgroups of cells with characteristic morphology are present across patients and the liquid and solid cell compartments.
Analysis of tumor touch preparations in parallel with the conventional liquid biopsy cell profiling within the HD-SCA platform can be readily introduced to the workflow to assess the level of concordance within a patient, and to determine the applicability of liquid biopsies for tumor characterization for each individual case.
Full text - https://doi.org/10.18632/oncotarget.27271
Correspondence to - Peter Kuhn - pkuhn@usc.edu
Keywords - single cell analysis, liquid biopsy, metastatic colorectal cancer, circulating tumor cells, cytomorphology
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