Circulating tumor cells in individualized cancer treatment

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs), shed from solid tumors, are new biomarkers originating from primary and/or metastatic tumors. CTCs represent a key to understand the biology of non-hematological cancer metastasis and provide non-invasive diagnostic and prognostic tool to pursue therapeutic responses and also the status of the tumor progression.CTCs assessment provides promises for early diagnosis, finding new personalized therapeutic targets, handing more powerful personalized treatments, detecting of relapses and extending life expectancy as one of the most medical purposes. Accordingly, novel technologies have been developed to efficiently isolate CTCs from patient peripheral blood and enumerate them. Most popular and applied methods of CTC assay are based on the genomic or protein content of the cells, which are thoroughly associated with genetic modulation and changes of affected cells in cancer progression. minute abundance and heterogeneity of CTCs in blood samples hinder effective identification and isolation of these promising biomarkers in each individual person, however considering the importance and reliable feature of these individualized biomarkers as diagnostic and prognostic tools, more efficient and suitable procedures have to be developed to determine CTCs properties and use them as personalized cancerous biomarkers in order to increase the chance of successful personalized treatment.

کلیدواژه ها:

Circulating tumor cells ، biomarker ، early diagnosis ، personalized treatment