Center for Prostate Cancer, Hospital, National Cancer Center, Goyang, Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea.
Biomed Res Int. 2017;2017:7206307. doi: 10.1155/2017/7206307. Epub 2017 Nov 5.
Prostate cancer (PC) is the second most common cancer in men and is the fifth leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Additionally, there is concern for overdiagnosis and overtreatment of PC. Thus, selection of an appropriate candidate for active surveillance as well as more accurate and less invasive tools for monitoring advanced PC is required. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have emerged as a liquid biopsy tool; there have been several reports on its role, technologies, and applications to various cancers, including PC. Liquid biopsy using CTCs has been gaining attention as a minimal invasive tool for investigation of biomarkers and for prognosis and assessment of response to therapies in patients with PC. Because of the lower invasiveness of liquid biopsy using CTCs, it can be performed more frequently; accordingly, personalized disease status can be successively determined at serial time points. CTC analysis enables detection of genomic alterations, which is drug-targetable, and it is a potential tool for monitoring response to therapeutic agents in patients with PC. This review focuses on the characteristics, technologies for analysis, and advantages and disadvantages of CTCs as a liquid biopsy tool and their application in PC. Finally, we propose future directions of CTCs.
前列腺癌（PC）是男性中第二常见的癌症，也是全球癌症相关死亡的第五大主要原因。此外，人们还担心 PC 的过度诊断和过度治疗。因此，需要选择合适的主动监测候选者，以及更准确和微创的工具来监测晚期 PC。循环肿瘤细胞（CTC）已成为一种液体活检工具；已有多项关于其在各种癌症（包括 PC）中的作用、技术和应用的报告。使用 CTC 的液体活检作为一种用于研究生物标志物、预测和评估 PC 患者治疗反应的微创工具，已引起人们的关注。由于使用 CTC 的液体活检的侵袭性较低，因此可以更频繁地进行；因此，可以在连续的时间点上连续确定个性化的疾病状态。CTC 分析可检测到可靶向药物的基因组改变，是监测 PC 患者对治疗药物反应的潜在工具。本综述重点介绍了 CTC 作为液体活检工具的特征、分析技术以及优缺点及其在 PC 中的应用。最后，我们提出了 CTC 的未来发展方向。
