Enrichment of Circulating Tumor Cells of Lung Cancer and Correlation With Serum Leukomonocyte and Tumor Biomarkers: A Retrospective Study.

STUDY DESIGN: Circulating tumor cells is important in the clinical diagnosis of cancer and there are a number of circulating tumor cell detection systems associated with different isolation strategies being validated. There is a novel platform, the CytoBot 2000, which utilizes a combination of physical and immunological technologies to isolate and capture circulating tumor cells.

METHODS: In this retrospective study, 39 lung cancer patients and 11 normal healthy individuals were enrolled and performed circulating tumor cell tests and immunofluorescence staining with CytoBot 2000. The performance of this device was assessed by receiver operating characteristic curve. The clinical relevance of circulating tumor cells was assessed by Chi-square. The correlations between circulating tumor cell number and blood lymphocytes and tumor biomarkers were analyzed by Pearson correlation coefficient.

RESULTS: The number of circulating tumor cell is significantly increased in lung cancer patients (3.74 > 0.45, P  < .0001). The CytoBot 2000 presented a 100% (39/39) circulating tumor cell detection rate in lung cancer patients and 36% (4/11) in healthy individual blood samples, the sensitivity and specificity were 89.7% and 90.9%, respectively, and with the area under curve of 0.966. Further, there was a positive correlation between circulating tumor cell count and carcinoembryonic antigen 211 (R2  = 0.125, P  = .027), but not blood lymphocytes ( P  = .089).

CONCLUSIONS: This automatic platform showed excellent performance of circulating tumor cell detection by clinical sample. The tumor biomarkers increased with the number of circulating tumor cell in the lung cancer patients.