Circulating Tumour Cell Enumeration and Molecular Evaluation in Patients with Advanced Prostate Carcinoma.

前列腺癌是男性癌症死亡的第二大常见原因。自从睾丸睾酮剥夺被确定为一种治疗方式以来，这种疾病的治疗进展甚微。迫切需要加速开发这种疾病的新疗法。治疗这种疾病的关键瓶颈包括哪些药物导致临床益处的临床预测因子较差，以及缺乏获得激素抗性癌细胞以了解该疾病的生物学。这导致长期试验，持续多年，评估新的治疗方法是否延长了大量患者的死亡时间。据设想，使用经验证的新技术对患者血液中的前列腺癌细胞进行计数、分离和研究将加快临床试验，并允许获得肿瘤细胞以研究这种疾病的生物学，从而改善对这种未满足需求的治疗。

Prostate cancer is the second commonest cause of death from cancer in men. Little progress has been made in the treatment of this disease since testicular testosterone deprivation was identified as a therapeutic modality. There is an urgent need to accelerate the development of novel therapies for this disease. Key bottlenecks to the treatment of this disease include poor clinical predictors of which drugs result in clinical benefit, and lack of access to hormone resistant cancer cells to understand the biology of the disease. This results in protracted trials, lasting many years, evaluating whether new treatments prolong time to death of large numbers of patients. It is envisioned that the enumeration, separation and study of prostate cancer cells in the blood of patients using validated new technology will expedite clinical trials and allow access to tumour cells for the study of the biology of this disease, leading to improvements in treatment for this unmet need.