The reactivation of dormant DTCs and their release into the bloodstream as circulating tumour cells (CTCs), is the process by which a patient may, sometimes after many years of remission, suffer a relapse through metastasis. There is intense interest in the existence and status of such DTCs that are ‘hibernating’ in the bone marrow.
ANGLE Founder and Chief Executive, Andrew Newland, said: “The presence of disseminated tumour cells (DTCs) in bone marrow has been shown in multiple studies to be predictive of clinical relapse. The research from the Center for Women’s Health in Tuebingen demonstrates the utility of Parsortix in harvesting disseminated cancer cells from bone marrow, extending the potential applications of our liquid biopsy system significantly.”
At present, the method of choice for detecting DTCs is a density gradient centrifugation of the bone marrow to enrich for mononuclear cells and then an antibody-based staining for various cell markers.
In experiments with spiked cancer cells this procedure was shown to be accompanied by a tremendous reduction of target cells with an average of up to 80% cell loss. This may well be one reason why, in primary breast cancer, DTCs have been found in the bone marrow of only 20-30% of patients.
The Tuebingen researchers have shown that their newly established Parsortix based protocol allows a recovery of about 80% of input target cells.
Furthermore, the Tuebingen team believe that this easy to use method may well be applicable to other (non-blood) body fluids for detection of tumour cells for liquid biopsies.
The University Hospital Tuebingen research results were presented in a poster at Europe’s leading CTC conference, the Third International Advances in Circulating Tumour Cells (ACTC) Symposium. A copy of the poster is available at the Angle library.
Dr André Koch, Center for Women's Health, Tuebingen said: “The Parsortix system shows huge promise in improving the efficiency of isolating DTCs from bone marrow. At our Women’s Hospital, taking bone marrow is routine during surgery on breast cancer patients, so improvements to processing and then analysis of the bone marrow are particularly valuable. We are excited about the opportunities this opens up.”
