Identification and enumeration of circulating tumor cells in neuroendocrine tumor patients with GILUPI CellCollector®

GILUPI GmbH announces, that in August 2016 a published scientific paper demonstrated for the first time circulating tumor cell (CTCs) isolation in neuroendocrine tumor patients with GILUPI CellCollector®.

Isolating and analysing circulating tumor cells as a 'liquid biopsy' can be an additional source of diagnosis, prognosis, evaluation of treatment efficacy and molecular tumor evolution and metastatic sites. CTCs have been, so far, identified in patients with metastatic neuroendocrine tumor (NET) using a comparator method with limited sampling volume that leads to the detection of low frequency CTC numbers. Professor Tim Meyer and his group from the UCL Cancer Institute, University College London wanted to overcome this limitation and increases CTCs numbers by using the GILUPI CellCollector®.

In their study, the researcher used the GILUPI CellCollector® and the comparator method. In total, 34 patients with metastatic NET were enrolled and the GILUPI CellCollector® was used to isolate CTCs in vivo.

Applying the GILUPI CellCollector® in 33 of 34 NET patients CTCs were found with a median of 6 CTCs. In comparison, in only 16 of 34 NET patients with a median of 0 CTC could be detected with the comparator method. More importantly, the researcher investigated the prognostic relevance of CTC count with GILUPI CellCollector®. Using a cut-off of 7 CTCs, the progression free survival of patients with less than or equal seven CTCs was in median 11 months compared to patients with more than seven CTCs had a significantly lower progression free survival. Further studies are needed to validate this finding to potentially aid the treatment of patients with neuroendocrine tumors.

The scientific paper entitled 'A comparison of CellCollector with CellSearch in patients with neuroendocrine tumors' by Mandair et al., was published in Endocrine-Related Cancer, pii: ERC-16-0201. PMID:27521132 (12th August 2016).