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: Thais Pereira-Veiga M ónica Martínez-Fernández Carmen Abuin Roberto Pi ñeiro Victor Cebey Juan Cueva Patricia Palacios Cristina Blanco Laura Muinelo-Romay Alicia Abalo Clotilde Costa Rafael L ópez-López Tags: Article Source Type: research