Cancers, Vol. 11, Pages 1941: CTCs Expression Profiling for Advanced Breast Cancer Monitoring

Cancers, Vol. 11, Pages 1941: CTCs Expression Profiling for Advanced Breast Cancer Monitoring Cancers doi: 10.3390/cancers11121941 Authors: Thais Pereira-Veiga Mónica Martínez-Fernández Carmen Abuin Roberto Piñeiro Victor Cebey Juan Cueva Patricia Palacios Cristina Blanco Laura Muinelo-Romay Alicia Abalo Clotilde Costa Rafael López-López The study of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) has a huge clinical interest in advance and metastatic breast cancer patients. However, many approaches are biased by the use of epithelial markers, which underestimate non-epithelial CTCs phenotypes. CTCs enumeration provides valuable prognostic information; however, molecular characterization could be the best option to monitor patients throughout the disease since it may provide more relevant clinical information to the physicians. In this work, we aimed at enumerating and performing a molecular characterization of CTCs from a cohort of 20 patients with metastatic breast cancer (MBC), monitoring the disease at different time points of the therapy, and at progression when it occurred. To this end, we used a CTC negative enrichment protocol that allowed us to recover a higher variety of CTCs phenotypes. With this strategy, we were able to obtain gene expression data from CTCs from all the patients. In addition, we found that high expression levels of PALB2 and MYC were associated with a worse outcome. Interestingly, we identified that CTCs with an EpCAMhighVIMlow...
Source: Cancers - Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Tags: Article Source Type: research