Abstract 3075: Ex-vivo expansion of circulating tumor cells in early lung cancer using a microfluidic model

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have gathered much momentum in recent times with emerging micro and nanotechnologies enabling better recoveries of these rare cells. Future research directions in CTCs significantly depend on obtaining meaningful number of CTCs that are available for downstream assays. This can be achieved by expanding CTCs. However, in early stage cancer patients, the numbers of cells that circulate in the peripheral blood are rare. Therefore until now, expanding CTCs remains to be a serious challenge limiting clinical utility. Microfluidic technologies have demonstrated that these rare cells can be recovered with better efficiency, purity and high viability. Herein, we developed a strategy using microfluidic technology to isolate and expand CTCs. We have successfully expanded CTCs isolated from 16 out of 21 early stage lung cancer patients. Expanded CTCs expressed tumor specific markers and formed spheroids in culture. Furthermore, these expanded CTCs carried the identical cancer related mutations (e.g. TP53 mutation) as their primary tumors. We expect that our model opens up the unprecedented avenues to understand biology of these lethal drivers of metastasis offering opportunities for personalized medicine through target drug evaluations. Citation Format: Jennifer Zhuo Zhang, Hiroe Shiratsuchi, Jules Lin, Guoan Chen, Rishindra M. Reddy, Ebrahim Azizi, Shamileh Fouladdel, Andrew C. Chang, Lin Lin, Diane M. Simeone, Max S. Wicha, David G. Beer, Nithya Ramnath, Sunitha Nagrath. Ex-vivo expansion of circulating tumor cells in early lung cancer using a microfluidic model. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2014 Apr 5-9; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2014;74(19 Suppl):Abstract nr 3075. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2014-3075