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。自从睾丸睾丸激素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。迫切需要加快开发治疗这种疾病的新疗法。治疗这种疾病的关键瓶颈包括对哪些药物产生临床益处的临床预测不佳，以及缺乏获得激素抗性癌细胞以了解疾病生物学的机会。这导致了持续多年的旷日持久的试验，评估新的治疗方法是否会延长大量患者的死亡时间。据设想，使用经过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，并允许获得用于研究这种疾病生物学的肿瘤细胞，从而改进对这一未得到满足的需求的治疗。

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.