Department of Radiation Oncology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, United States; Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Boston, MA, United States; Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States.
Department of Radiation Oncology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, United States.
Adv Drug Deliv Rev. 2018 Feb 1;125:122-131. doi: 10.1016/j.addr.2018.01.003. Epub 2018 Jan 8.
Advances in our molecular understanding of cancer biology have paved the way to an expanding compendium of molecularly-targeted therapies, accompanied by the urgent need for biomarkers that enable the precise selection of the most appropriate therapies for individual cancer patients. Circulating biomarkers such as circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are poised to fill this need, since they are "liquid biopsies" that can be performed non-invasively and serially, and may capture the spectrum of spatial and temporal tumor heterogeneity better than conventional tissue biopsies. Increasing evidence suggests that moving beyond the enumeration of CTCs towards more sophisticated molecular analyses can provide actionable data that may predict and potentially improve clinical outcomes. In this review, we discuss the potential of molecular CTC analyses to serve as prognostic and predictive biomarkers to guide cancer therapy and early cancer detection. As technologies to capture and analyze CTCs continue to increase in sophistication, we anticipate that the potential clinical applications of CTCs will grow exponentially in the coming years.
我们对癌症生物学的分子认识的进步为不断扩展的分子靶向治疗提供了基础，同时也迫切需要生物标志物来为个体癌症患者精确选择最合适的治疗方法。循环生物标志物，如循环肿瘤细胞（CTC），有望满足这一需求，因为它们是“液体活检”，可以非侵入性和连续进行，并且可能比传统的组织活检更好地捕获空间和时间上肿瘤异质性的全貌。越来越多的证据表明，超越对 CTC 的计数，转向更复杂的分子分析，可以提供有意义的数据，可能预测并潜在改善临床结果。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了分子 CTC 分析作为预后和预测生物标志物的潜力，以指导癌症治疗和早期癌症检测。随着捕获和分析 CTC 的技术不断复杂化，我们预计 CTC 的潜在临床应用在未来几年将呈指数级增长。
