Biosensors for the Detection of Circulating Tumour Cells

Sensors

Clotilde Costa¹  Miguel Abal¹  Rafael López-López¹ 

[1] Translational Medical Oncology, Health Research Institute of Santiago (IDIS); Complexo Hospitalario Universitario de Santiago de Compostela (SERGAS); Trav. Choupana s/n 15706 Santiago de Compostela, Spain; E-Mails:

关键词: circulating tumour cells (CTCs);    isolation;    enrichment;    detection;    sensors;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s140304856

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Metastasis is the cause of most cancer deaths. Circulating tumour cells (CTCs) are cells released from the primary tumour into the bloodstream that are considered the main promoters of metastasis. Therefore, these cells are targets for understanding tumour biology and improving clinical management of the disease. Several techniques have emerged in recent years to isolate, detect, and characterise CTCs. As CTCs are a rare event, their study requires multidisciplinary considerations of both biological and physical properties. In addition, as isolation of viable cells may give further insights into metastatic development, cell recovery must be done with minimal cell damage. The ideal system for CTCs analysis must include maximum efficiency of detection in real time. In this sense, new approaches used to enrich CTCs from clinical samples have provided an important improvement in cell recovery. However, this progress should be accompanied by more efficient strategies of cell quantification. A range of biosensor platforms are being introduced into the technology for CTCs quantification with promising results. This review provides an update on recent progress in CTCs identification using different approaches based on sensor signaling.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.