Genetic analysis of circulating tumor cells in pancreatic cancer patients: A pilot study

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive malignant tumors, mainly due to an aggressive metastasis spreading. In recent years, circulating tumor cells became associated to tumor metastasis. Little is known about their expression profiles.The aim of this study was to develop a complete workflow making it possible to isolate circulating tumor cells from patients with pancreatic cancer and their genetic characterization.Results: We show that the proposed workflow offers a technical sensitivity and specificity high enough to detect and isolate single tumor cells. Moreover our approach makes feasible to genetically characterize single CTCs.Conclusions: Our work discloses a complete workflow to detect, count and genetically analyze individual CTCs isolated from blood samples. This method has a central impact on the early detection of metastasis development. The combination of cell quantification and genetic analysis provides the clinicians with a powerful tool not available so far.