Beckman Coulter Biomedical GmbH, Sauerbruchstrasse 50 - 81377 Munich, Germany.
Methods. 2010 Apr;50(4):289-97. doi: 10.1016/j.ymeth.2010.01.027. Epub 2010 Jan 29.
Circulating Tumour Cells (CTCs) can be released from the primary tumour into the bloodstream and may colonize distant organs giving rise to metastasis. The presence of CTCs in the blood has been documented more than a century ago, and in the meanwhile various methods have been described for their detection. Most of them require an initial enrichment step, since CTCs are a very rare event. The different technologies and also the differences among the screened populations make the clinical significance of CTCs detection difficult to interprete. Here we will review the different assays up to now available for CTC detection and analysis. Moreover, we will focus on the relevance of the clinical data, generated so far and based on the CTCs analysis. Since the vast majority of data have been produced in breast cancer patients, the review will focus especially on this malignancy.
循环肿瘤细胞（CTC）可以从原发性肿瘤释放到血液中，并可能在远处器官定植，从而导致转移。血液中 CTC 的存在早在一个多世纪前就有记载，同时也描述了各种用于检测它们的方法。由于 CTC 非常罕见，大多数方法都需要进行初始富集步骤。不同的技术以及筛选人群之间的差异使得 CTC 检测的临床意义难以解释。在这里，我们将回顾迄今为止可用于 CTC 检测和分析的不同检测方法。此外，我们将重点关注迄今为止基于 CTC 分析产生的临床数据的相关性。由于绝大多数数据是在乳腺癌患者中产生的，因此该综述将特别关注这种恶性肿瘤。
