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Updated: Jul 27, 2025
Rapid Isolation of Viable Circulating Tumor Cells from Patient Blood Samples
Published on: June 15, 2012
An adhesion-based method for rapid and low-cost isolation of circulating tumor cells
Xinyi Ye1, Jianjun Zou2, Jing Chen1
1Department of Laboratory Medicine, Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou 510515, China; Guangdong Engineering and Technology Research Center for Rapid Diagnostic Biosensors, Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou 510515, China.
Background:
Noninvasive monitoring of cancer through circulating tumor cells (CTCs) is hampered long by unsatisfactory CTCs testing techniques. Efficient isolation of CTCs in a rapid and price-favorable way from billions of leukocytes is crucial for testing.
Methods:
We developed a new method based on the stronger adhesive power of CTCs versus leukocytes to sensitively isolate CTCs. Using a BSA-coated microplate and low-speed centrifuge, this method could easily separate cancer cells within 20 min at a very low cost.
Result:
The capture ratio can reach 70.7-86.6% in various cancer cell lines (breast/lung/liver/cervical/colorectal cancer) covering different epithelial-mesenchymal transformation (EMT) phenotypes and cell sizes, demonstrating the potential for efficient pan-cancer CTCs detection. Moreover, the label-free process can well preserve cell viability (∼99%) to fit downstream DNA/RNA sequencing.
Conclusions:
A novel technique for non-destructive and rapid enrichment of CTCs has been devised. It has enabled the successful isolation of rare tumor cells in the patient blood sample and pleural effusion, highlighting a promising future of this method in clinical translation.
