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Updated: Mar 3, 2026
Target Cell Pre-enrichment and Whole Genome Amplification for Single Cell Downstream Characterization
Published on: May 15, 2018
Enrichment and single-cell analysis of circulating tumor cells
Yanling Song1,2, Tian Tian1, Yuanzhi Shi1
1MOE Key Laboratory of Spectrochemical Analysis & Instrumentation , The Key Laboratory of Chemical Biology of Fujian Province , State Key Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces , Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemistry for Energy Materials , Department of Chemical Engineering , Department of Chemical Biology , College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering , Xiamen University , Xiamen 361005 , China .
Abstract:
Up to 90% of cancer-related deaths are caused by metastatic cancer. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs), a type of cancer cell that spreads through the blood after detaching from a solid tumor, are essential for the establishment of distant metastasis for a given cancer. As a new type of liquid biopsy, analysis of CTCs offers the possibility to avoid invasive tissue biopsy procedures with practical implications for diagnostics. The fundamental challenges of analyzing and profiling CTCs are the extremely low abundances of CTCs in the blood and the intrinsic heterogeneity of CTCs. Various technologies have been proposed for the enrichment and single-cell analysis of CTCs. This review aims to provide in-depth insights into CTC analysis, including various techniques for isolation of CTCs with capture methods based on physical and biochemical principles, and single-cell analysis of CTCs at the genomic, proteomic and phenotypic level, as well as current developmental trends and promising research directions.
