Centre for Medical Parasitology at Department of Immunology and Microbiology, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen and Department of Infectious Diseases, Copenhagen University Hospital, 2200 Copenhagen, Denmark.
VarCT Diagnostics, 2200 Copenhagen, Denmark.
Int J Mol Sci. 2020 Mar 31;21(7):2401. doi: 10.3390/ijms21072401.
Early detection and monitoring of cancer progression is key to successful treatment. Therefore, much research is invested in developing technologies, enabling effective and valuable use of non-invasive liquid biopsies. This includes the detection and analysis of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from blood samples. Recombinant malaria protein VAR2CSA (rVAR2) binds a unique chondroitin sulfate modification present on the vast majority of cancers and thereby holds promise as a near-universal tumor cell-targeting reagent to isolate CTCs from complex blood samples. This study describes a technical approach for optimizing the coupling of rVAR2 to magnetic beads and the development of a CTC isolation platform targeting a range of different cancer cell lines. We investigate both direct and indirect approaches for rVAR2-mediated bead retrieval of cancer cells and conclude that an indirect capture approach is most effective for rVAR2-based cancer cell retrieval.
癌症进展的早期检测和监测是成功治疗的关键。因此，大量研究致力于开发技术，使非侵入性液体活检得到有效和有价值的应用。这包括从血液样本中检测和分析循环肿瘤细胞（CTC）。重组疟疾蛋白 VAR2CSA（rVAR2）与绝大多数癌症上存在的独特硫酸软骨素修饰物结合，因此有望成为一种近乎通用的肿瘤细胞靶向试剂，从复杂的血液样本中分离 CTC。本研究描述了一种优化 rVAR2 与磁性珠偶联的技术方法，并开发了一种针对多种不同癌细胞系的 CTC 分离平台。我们研究了 rVAR2 介导的癌细胞珠回收的直接和间接方法，并得出结论，间接捕获方法是基于 rVAR2 的癌细胞回收最有效的方法。
