A new microfilter device may aid in the diagnosis and therapeutic decisions for patients with cancer, according to a study conducted at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine in collaboration with the California Institute of Technology. 

"This is a cheaper and faster method of examining the circulating tumour cell (CTC) environment. As we continue to refine it, we can do a better job of characterising different disease states and evaluating a patient’s response to therapy. This will push us further in the direction of personalised patient management," said Anthony Williams, a graduate student at the Keck School of Medicine, presenting the information at the AACR Annual Meeting.

The microfilter device, which he estimates is about three to five years from clinical use, uses 7.5 ml of blood drawn from patients with cancer by standard measures and captures CTC based on size differences between tumour and normal blood cells. The captured CTC are then accessible for downstream on-chip molecular analyses. For the current study, Williams and colleagues compared the success rate of filtration against the current clinical gold standard. 

In a model system where cultured tumour cells were seeded into 7.5 ml blood from a normal healthy donor, statistical analyses confirmed that the true chance of recovering at least one tumour cell when five are seeded using the microfilter device is 95 per cent or greater. In clinical blood samples collected at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the microfilter device successfully captured CTC in 92.9 per cent of patients with metastatic cancer. By contrast, the gold standard only captured CTC in 45.6 per cent of corresponding samples.

 "This has the potential to be a transformative technology," Williams said.