Establishment and clinical value of a circulating tumor cell system based on a multi-site immune lipid magnetic sphere technique in laryngopharyngeal head and neck tumors.

This study aimed to construct multi-site magnetic nanospheres to capture circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from peripheral blood specimens of laryngopharyngeal head and neck tumors. Separated CTCs were used to measure downstream molecular markers and to detect and analyze the disease status. A stable CTC multisite nano-enrichment system was used to determine changes in CTCs levels in Programmed Death-Ligand-1 (PD-L1)-positive patients and to assess the extent of real-time changes in CTCs over the course of the disease in correlation with clinicopathological indicators. The results demonstrated that the constructed immunomagnetic spheres could effectively capture CTCs and that the constructed lipid nanoparticles exhibited high capture efficiency and low cytotoxicity. The results of the concordance or complementarity analyses of PD-L1 expression at the CTC and tissue levels indicated good concordance between the two at up to 70%. The analysis of PD-L1 expression and the changes in CTCs in PD-L1-positive cells plays an auxiliary role in clinical diagnosis and can be used as a dynamic detection index for the course of head, neck, and throat tumor treatment and as a predictor of recurrence risk.