CTCs Expression Profiling for Advanced Breast Cancer Monitoring.
Thais Pereira-VeigaMónica Martínez-FernándezCarmen AbuínRoberto PiñeiroVictor CebeyJuan CuevaPatricia PalaciosCristina BlancoLaura Muinelo-RomayAlicia AbaloClotilde CostaRafael López-LópezPublished in: Cancers (2019)
The study of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) has a huge clinical interest in advance and metastatic breast cancer patients. However, many approaches are biased by the use of epithelial markers, which underestimate non-epithelial CTCs phenotypes. CTCs enumeration provides valuable prognostic information; however, molecular characterization could be the best option to monitor patients throughout the disease since it may provide more relevant clinical information to the physicians. In this work, we aimed at enumerating and performing a molecular characterization of CTCs from a cohort of 20 patients with metastatic breast cancer (MBC), monitoring the disease at different time points of the therapy, and at progression when it occurred. To this end, we used a CTC negative enrichment protocol that allowed us to recover a higher variety of CTCs phenotypes. With this strategy, we were able to obtain gene expression data from CTCs from all the patients. In addition, we found that high expression levels of PALB2 and MYC were associated with a worse outcome. Interestingly, we identified that CTCs with an EpCAMhighVIMlowALDH1A1high signature showed both shorter overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS), suggesting that CTCs with epithelial-stem features had the most aggressive phenotype.
Keyphrases
- circulating tumor cells
- circulating tumor
- gene expression
- end stage renal disease
- free survival
- newly diagnosed
- ejection fraction
- metastatic breast cancer
- squamous cell carcinoma
- peritoneal dialysis
- prognostic factors
- stem cells
- small cell lung cancer
- primary care
- poor prognosis
- dna methylation
- transcription factor
- long non coding rna
- machine learning
- big data
- bone marrow