Analysis of Circulating Tumor Cell Heterogeneity Using a Multi-Marker Microscale Capture Approach as a tool in the Management and Treatment of Cancer

循环肿瘤细胞（CTCs）是从原发肿瘤释放到患者血液中的细胞，与转移有关。监测这些细胞是监测患者疾病进展的一种手段，而不需要侵入性组织取样。然而，这些细胞极其罕见，在数十亿血细胞的背景下，只有个位数的细胞计数。因此，分离这些细胞是非常具有挑战性的。我们已经开发了一种新设备，它不仅能够从患者血液样本中捕获这些细胞，而且还能够根据这些细胞的表面蛋白质对它们进行分类。在这个提议中，我们的目标是利用这些表面蛋白的表达水平来表征某些ctc亚群转移和在身体其他部位形成肿瘤的倾向。此外，我们将扩展该设备的实用性，以同时基于多个标记来分析ctc。这些知识，连同高分辨率的CTCs人群分析，可能被证明是临床医生管理和治疗癌症的有力工具。

Circulating tumour cells (CTCs) are cells released from a primary tumour into the bloodstream of a patient and have beenimplicated in metastasis. Monitoring these cells represents a means to monitor a patients disease progression without theneed for invasive tissue sampling. These cells, however, are extremely rare with single-digit cell counts existing in abackground of billions of blood cells. It is therefore very challenging to isolate these cells. We have developed a noveldevice that is capable of not only capturing these cells from a patients blood sample, but also sorting these cells based ontheir surface proteins. In this proposal we aim to use the expression levels of these surface proteins to characterize thepropensity of certain subpopulations of CTCs to metastasize and form tumours elsewhere in the body. In addition we willexpand the utility of this device to profile CTCs based on multiple markers simultaneously. This knowledge, along with highresolutionpopulation profiling of CTCs, may prove to be a powerful tool for clinicians in the management and treatment ofcancer.