Ex vivo culture of circulating breast tumor cells for individualized testing of drug susceptibility
By Min Yu, A. Bardia, N. Aceto, Francesca Bersani, M. W. Madden, M. C. Donaldson, R. Desai, Huili Zhu, Valentine Comaills, Zongli Zheng and 14 more. Science, 2014
887 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Staying one step ahead of tumors Cancer treatments require continual adjustment. A drug that works initially will lose its potency as the tumor acquires new mutations that allow it to bypass the drug's lethal effects. To stay ahead of the tumor, oncologists need a noninvasive way to collect tumor cells from patients over the course of their treatment. Analyzing the mutations in these samples may help them choose the right drugs as the tumors change. In a small study of breast cancer patients, Yu et al. show that rare tumor cells circulating in the blood can be captured in viable form and used for this purpose. Science, this issue p. 216 Mutational analysis of tumor cells isolated from the blood of cancer patients may help optimize treatment selection. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are present at low concentrations in the peripheral blood of patients with solid tumors. It has been proposed that the isolation, ex vivo culture, and characterization of CTCs may provide an opportunity to noninvasively monitor the changing patterns of drug susceptibility in individual patients as their tumors acquire new mutations. In a proof-of-concept study, we established CTC cultures from six patients with estrogen receptor–positive breast cancer. Three of five CTC lines tested were tumorigenic in mice. Genome sequencing of the CTC lines revealed preexisting mutations in the PIK3CA gene and newly acquired mutations in the estrogen receptor gene (ESR1), PIK3CA gene, and fibroblast growth factor receptor gene (FGFR2), among others. Drug sensitivity testing of CTC lines with multiple mutations revealed potential new therapeutic targets. With optimization of CTC culture conditions, this strategy may help identify the best therapies for individual cancer patients over the course of their disease.
Subfields: Cancer Research, Molecular Biology, Oncology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e879085798d8843c2cb05ffc3aca820b4126b814
How researchers see this paper
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In Cancer Research
In Molecular Biology
In Oncology
- D. Pattabiraman
- Arthur W. Lambert
- R. Weinberg
- Razelle Kurzrock
- M. Nieto
- D. Hanahan
- Lisa M. Coussens
- Zena Werb
Citations in the corpus
- Liquid biopsy: current technology and clinical applications (2022, methodology): “CTCs have been used to establish cell lines for prostate [24], lung [25], breast [26], and colon cancer [27].”
- EMERGING BIOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF METASTASIS (2017, positive): “In addition, the isolation, ex vivo expansion, and analysis of viable CTCs can be used to profile genetic mutations and drug sensitivities of the cells residing within primary tumors (Yu et al., 2014).”