Therapeutic Response Evaluation by CTC Expansion System

Among biomarkers, CTCs are a convenient, sensitive and biologically informative option. CTC detection could be considered a real-time "liquid biopsy" approach and contains several advantages such as minimally invasive, easy and safe to perform, and multiple samples can be taken over time, better prognosis to indicate an elevated risk of metastases, improved therapy monitoring, providing live disease status information., However, the number of CTCs is very low, so the establishment of cell culture from CTCs becomes the most challenging over the past year. In this study, we develop a short-term CTC expansion protocol combined with a new surface coating technique. Expanded circulating tumor cells will provide genetic information and develop oncology drug screening platform, which provides an opportunity to monitor response to therapy noninvasively.