Liquid biopsy - isolating and analyzing circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from the blood of prostate cancer patients - can provide additional information on prognosis of patients, treatment efficacy and molecular tumor evolution. Prof. Klaus Pantel, Dr. Kuske and further researchers from the department of tumor biology at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf investigated the prognostic relevance of CTCs in non-mestastatic prostate cancer. The goal of this study was to increase the sensitivity of CTC detection in patients with high-risk prostate cancer through the combination of three complementary assays. For this purpose the unique and innovative GILUPI CellCollector® in vivo technology was included in this study.
Peripheral blood was analyzed directly before and 3 month after radical prostatectomy to assess early dynamics in CTC counts. In total, 86 and 52 patients were enrolled before radical prostatectomy and 3 month after surgery, respectively.
In this clinical trial, combined application of the different CTC detection technologies revealed for the first time, a high incidence of CTCs in non-metastatic high-risk prostate cancer patients. Moreover, the researcher showed that the usual restriction of analyzing large blood volumes from cancer patients could be circumvented by GILUPI CellCollector® application, which resulted in equal or higher incidences CTC detection as comparator systems. More importantly, CTC rates detected by the GILUPI CellCollector® displayed a statistically significant decrease after surgery (66% to 34%, p = 0.031). These data revealed that after radical prostatectomy a reduced number of EpCAM-positive CTCs circulate in the blood stream, which is likely owed to the fact that the primary tumor as a major source of CTCs had been removed.
[1] Kuske et al. "Improved detection of circulating tumor cells in non-metastatic high-risk prostate cancer patients.”, Scientific Reports, 2016 Dec 21; 6:39736. doi: 10.1038/srep39736. eCollection 2016.