A Randomized Trial Assessing the Safety, Pharmacokinetics, and Efficacy During Morning Off of AZ-009.

Background: Inhalation of apomorphine could be a faster-acting and more user-friendly alternative to subcutaneous injection for treating off periods in Parkinson's disease (PD).

Objective: The aim of this study was to compare the safety and pharmacokinetics of inhaled apomorphine (AZ-009) with subcutaneous apomorphine (APO-go PEN) in healthy volunteers (HVs) and to examine the safety, pharmacokinetics, and efficacy of AZ-009 in patients with PD.

Methods: In part A of this study, eight HVs received 1 mg AZ-009 and 2 mg subcutaneous apomorphine in a randomized crossover manner.

Antibody-independent capture of circulating tumor cells of non-epithelial origin with the ApoStream® system.

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are increasingly employed for research and clinical monitoring of cancer, though most current methods do not permit the isolation of non-epithelial tumor cells. Furthermore, CTCs isolated with antibody-dependent methods are not suitable for downstream experimental uses, including in vitro culturing and implantation in vivo. In the present study, we describe the development, validation, and transfer across laboratories of a new antibody-independent device for the enrichment of CTCs from blood samples of patients with various cancer diagnoses.

ApoStream(™), a new dielectrophoretic device for antibody independent isolation and recovery of viable cancer cells from blood.

Isolation and enumeration of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are used to monitor metastatic disease progression and guide cancer therapy. However, currently available technologies are limited to cells expressing specific cell surface markers, such as epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM) or have limited specificity because they are based on cell size alone. We developed a device, ApoStream(™) that overcomes these limitations by exploiting differences in the biophysical characteristics between cancer cells and normal, healthy blood cells to capture CTCs using dielectrophoretic technology in a microfluidic flow chamber.