Clinical evaluation of a novel microfluidic device for epitope-independent enrichment of circulating tumour cells in patients with small cell lung cancer.

Circulating tumour cells (CTCs) have potential utility as minimally-invasive biomarkers to aid cancer treatment decision making. However, many current CTC technologies enrich CTCs using specific surface epitopes that do not necessarily reflect CTC heterogeneity. Here we evaluated the epitope-independent Parsortix system which enriches CTCs based on size and rigidity using both healthy normal volunteer blood samples spiked with tumour cells and blood samples from patients with small cell lung cancer (SCLC).