CTC EARLY DETECTION

SERVICE PROFILE

Some cancer cells fall off from the primary tumor, migrate through adjacent tissue, access and travel through the vasculature as circulating tumor cells (CTCs), which is a key stage to tumor detection and treatment, and then survive and proliferate in distant organs. Ample evidence has shown that CTC detection is of great significance for early diagnosis, prognosis, and effective treatment of cancer, therefore improving clinical outcomes in cancer patients.

A pain point of cancer treatment lies in the early detection and diagnosis of tumors.  According to a published report from National Office for Cancer Prevention and Control, China, the five-year survival rate for Chinese cancer patients is currently 36.9%,  compared with 65.9% in the US. The discrepancies are mainly due to that a considerable number of cancer patients in China are in advanced stages when they first go to hospital to seek diagnosis and the tumor has metastasized, which makes treatment less likely to succeed and reduces their chances of survival. Therefore, CTC detection is of great importance in early screening and diagnosis of tumors. In addition, the difficulty of cancer treatment lies in its metastasis, and CTCs have a potentially high capacity of metastasis. In fact, they are seeding cells of a tumor and they enter into the vasculature individually or in groups. Due to coagulation with normal blood cells and genetic modification, fewer than 0.1% of highly energetic and highly metastatic CTCs escape from apoptosis in the bloodstream, gathering together and developing into a metastatic tumor under certain conditions in distant organs. There are many limitations in traditional tumor detection methods. Tissue biopsy is the gold standard of tumor detection, but it brings great pain to patients during the sampling process, and can’t be carried out frequently. It may not reflect the extent of tumor heterogeneity and miss clinically relevant tumor subclones. Conventional imaging (such as CT and PET-CT) can’t detect tiny early metastases because of its limited sensitivity. Once the tumor is detected by imaging examination, metastasis or recurrence often occurs, and already missed the best time to prevent tumor recurrence and metastasis. As the technology evolves, some new non-invasive CTC detection methods have filled in for the deficiency of traditional detection methods. Among them, the microfluid chip technology that we adopted allows separation of CTCs from the background leukocytes and improve sample purity up to 30-40% in less than 10 cells collected over other methods that capture cells in aggregates. It recovers single cells from the microfluidic chip for PCR, NGS and other analyses, such as SNP, TMB, MSI and CIN, for the early diagnosis and companion diagnosis of cancer.

People may be surprised by the earlier detection of cancer even without any imagining data to support; however, sole detection is not our purpose, instead, we can enrich CTC from patient’s plasma non-invasively, which can be used to identify potential neoantigens and to prepare personalized cancer vaccines for the treatment of cancer as early as possible.

PROCEDURE

In collaboration with other companies, research institutes and hospitals, the company has implemented advanced non-invasive CTC and ctDNA detection and analysis technology, which allowed for the detection of CTCs and ctDNA with apparent high sensitivity and specificity. Moreover, the system facilitated rapid capture of CTCs from blood samples and also allowed for downstream characterization of the captured CTCs and ctDNA. By using the technology, a certain number of CTCs and ctDNA have been detected in the plasma of a mouse cancer model and cancer patients, and CTCs and ctDNA have been recovered and enriched. In some cell samples, CTC accounted for 10-30% of the total cell numbers, which are ≥10. The early detection of CTC and ctDNA has been verified by next generation sequencing including WES and RNA-seq.

CONTACT US

Tel/Fax: +86-21-51320059，email: services@jenomed.com