Microgenomics 2021 : Molecular characterization of single Circulating Tumor Cells by PPinzani
Channel: The International Symposium on Microgenomics 2023
Date: 2022-01-25

Pamela Pinzani (UNIFI, Italy): "Molecular characterization of single Circulating Tumor Cells: challenges and promise for translation to the clinic"

Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) represent a “liquid biopsy of the tumor” which might allow real-time monitoring of cancer biology and therapies in individual patients. CTCs are extremely rare in the blood stream and their analysis is technically challenging.

Considerable progress has been made towards elucidating the basic biology of primary cancers, however, the molecular characterization of metastatic disease, which generally occurs months or years after primary tumor excision, remains limited. When patients with disseminated cancer undergo re-biopsy of metastatic disease, this generally happens for a single lesion even if multiple foci are present, with the majority of metastatic lesions not biopsied due to anatomic inaccessibility and/or associated morbidity of the procedure. Thus, the biological characterization of multiple metastatic sites is rarely performed, although recent data suggest that the selection of therapies according to the alterations of the metastatic lesions, rather than primary tumors, could be beneficial for the patient.

Alternatively, CTCs may offer a readily accessible means of evaluating the biology of metastatic cells, providing a non-invasive approach that could potentially identify drug sensitivity and resistance-associated markers, guiding therapeutic decisions.

While being a promising approach, CTC analysis, as a means of assessing the biological characteristics of metastatic disease, involves challenging technical aspects and requires further clinical validation.

During this presentation the feasibility of a protocol for the molecular characterization of single CTCs will be explored by reporting the results obtained in different type of cancers and highlighting the challenges to be overcome to obtain reliable results that can find applications in the clinic.