Cryopreservation of Circulating Tumor Cells for Enumeration and Characterization.

Background: A blood sample containing circulating tumor cells (CTCs) may serve as a surrogate for metastasis in invasive cancer. Cryopreservation will provide new opportunities in management of clinical samples in the laboratory and allow collection of samples over time for future analysis of existing and upcoming cancer biomarkers.

Methods: Blood samples from healthy volunteers were spiked with high (∼500) and low (∼50) number of tumor cells from culture.

Retracing Circulating Tumour Cells for Biomarker Characterization after Enumeration.

Background: Retracing and biomarker characterization of individual circulating tumour cells (CTCs) may potentially contribute to personalized metastatic cancer therapy. This is relevant when a biopsy of the metastasis is complicated or impossible to acquire.

Methods: A novel disc format was used to map and retrace individual CTCs from breast-cancer patients and nucleated cells from healthy blood donors using the CytoTrack platform.

In vitro detection of circulating tumor cells compared by the CytoTrack and CellSearch methods.

Comparison of two methods to detect circulating tumor cells (CTC) CytoTrack and CellSearch through recovery of MCF-7 breast cancer cells, spiked into blood collected from healthy donors. Spiking of a fixed number of EpCAM and pan-cytokeratin positive MCF-7 cells into 7.5 mL donor blood was performed by FACSAria flow sorting.