Intra-Patient Heterogeneity of Circulating Tumor Cells and Circulating Tumor DNA in Blood of Melanoma Patients

Overview

Journal Cancers (Basel)

Publisher MDPI

Specialty Oncology

Date 2019 Nov 2

PMID 31671846

Citations 18

Authors

Katharina Gorges

Lisa Wiltfang

Tobias M Gorges

Alexander Sartori

Lina Hildebrandt

Laura Keller

Beate Volkmer

Sven Peine

Anna Babayan

Ingrid Moll

Stefan W Schneider

Soren Twarock

Peter Mohr

Jens W Fischer

Klaus Pantel

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Despite remarkable progress in melanoma therapy, the exceptional heterogeneity of the disease has prevented the development of reliable companion biomarkers for the prediction or monitoring of therapy responses. Here, we show that difficulties in detecting blood-based markers, like circulating tumor cells (CTC), might arise from the translation of the mutational heterogeneity of melanoma cells towards their surface marker expression. We provide a unique method, which enables the molecular characterization of clinically relevant CTC subsets, as well as circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), from a single blood sample. The study demonstrates the benefit of a combined analysis of ctDNA and CTC counts in melanoma patients, revealing that CTC subsets and ctDNA provide synergistic real-time information on the mutational status, RNA and protein expression of melanoma cells in individual patients, in relation to clinical outcome.

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