Related Experiment Video For Circulating tumor cells
Updated: Aug 26, 2025
Building Up a High-throughput Screening Platform to Assess the Heterogeneity of HER2 Gene Amplification in Breast Cancers
Published on: December 5, 2017
Simultaneous Detection and HER2 Profiling of Circulating Breast Cancer Cells in Clinical Patients Using a Rare Cell
Tomoko Mori1, Atsuko Furukawa1, Turan Bilal2
1Department of Clinical Research and Regional Innovation, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan.
Background/Aim:
This study describes a rare cell sorter (RCS) method to detect circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and CTC clusters in whole blood without pretreatment.
Patients And Methods:
We collected samples from breast cancer patients at the University of Tsukuba Hospital. A total of 15 whole-blood specimens from patients with breast cancer were collected and analyzed via a microfluidics chip, fluorescence-conjugated antibody staining, and fluorescence microscopy. Of 15 total cases, eight were analyzed by RCS ver3 and seven were analyzed by RCS ver3.5 to reveal potential clinical differences in scanning methods. We then examined the HER2 status on 4 of the 15 patients using our RCS system.
Results:
RCS efficiently detected all subtypes of CTCs and CTC clusters from the peripheral blood of cancer patients. The concordance rate of HER2 status between tissue and CTCs in 4 tested clinical samples was 100%.
Conclusion:
RCS is a non-invasive method that allows for simultaneous detection of CTCs, cluster presence, and surface marker (e.g., HER2) status. Frequent sampling is, thus, possible and the large amount of data obtained will be clinically useful to predict response to therapy as well as plan adjunct support therapies in cancer patients.
