Department of Molecular Medicine, Sapienza University of Rome, 00161 Rome, Italy.
Department of Radiological, Oncological and Anatomopathological Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome, 00161 Rome, Italy.
Dis Markers. 2019 Sep 17;2019:1718920. doi: 10.1155/2019/1718920. eCollection 2019.
The CellSearch® system which is still considered the gold standard for the enumeration of circulating tumor cells (CTC) utilizes antibodies against the epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM) for CTC enrichment. Recently, CTC discarded by the CellSearch® system due to their low EpCAM expression have been isolated and analyzed. We here sought to discuss technical and biological issues concerning the isolation and characterization of EpCAM CTC, highlighting the enormous potential of this subpopulation discarded by CellSearch®, which might instead reveal an unexpected clinical significance in tumor types where CTC enumeration has never been validated for prognostic and predictive purpose.
CellSearch®系统仍然被认为是循环肿瘤细胞（CTC）计数的金标准，它利用针对上皮细胞黏附分子（EpCAM）的抗体进行 CTC 富集。最近，由于 EpCAM 表达水平低而被 CellSearch®系统丢弃的 CTC 已经被分离和分析。在这里，我们试图讨论 EpCAM CTC 分离和鉴定的技术和生物学问题，强调被 CellSearch®丢弃的这一亚群的巨大潜力，它可能在从未为预后和预测目的验证过 CTC 计数的肿瘤类型中显示出意想不到的临床意义。
