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Membrane microfilter device outperformed CellSearch
AACR 100th Annual Meeting
A novel membrane microfilter device for detecting circulating tumor cells in the blood was superior to the current industry standard CellSearch platform.
Anthony Williams, a graduate student at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, presented the results at the AACR 100th Annual Meeting in Denver. He said researchers have developed a size-based method of detecting circulating tumor cells.
“We use the well-known concept that circulating tumor cells are characteristically larger than their blood cell counterparts,” Williams said. “We’ve developed a microfilter with precisely controlled pore sizes to allow the smaller normal blood cells to pass while we capture the circulating tumor cells.”
Researchers first created a model by collecting five cultured human cancer cells collected from healthy donors. Those cells were added to 7.5 mL of whole blood, and the combination was processed through the membrane microfilter.
Williams and colleagues also analyzed 7.5 mL blood samples collected from 57 patients with metastatic cancer. The samples were processed 58 times, 29 of which involved the J82 bladder cancer cell.
The membrane microfilter device recovered at least one tumor cell from 96.5% of patients where J82 tumor cells were used, and 93.1% of patients where six tumor cell types were used. Williams said the true chance of recovering at least one tumor cell when five cells were seeded was 95% or greater.
The membrane microfilter recovered circulating tumor cells in 92.9% of patients with metastatic cancer compared with 45.6% for CellSearch. The researchers added that the microfilter device detected more circulating tumor cells in 52 of 57 patients when using both methods of detection. – by Jason Harris
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It's a very exciting new technology and this looks like a well done set
of experiments. My concern is, and this is true for any diagnostic, that one
must consider both sensitivity and specificity. In this case I don't mean just
the specificity of detecting non-cancer cells. That's relatively easy. It's the
specificity of detecting cancer cells that actually have biological meaning and
therefore clinical significance. Although Williams et al have done a very nice
job developing a new technology that could be very exciting, they have a lot of
work to do to demonstrate that it has either equal or more clinical utility
than CellSearch. I think that what it will do is give us yet another avenue to
evaluate cells once they're detected. 
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here to hear more perspective from Dr. Hayes.
– Daniel F. Hayes, MD
Clinical Director of the Breast Oncology Program,
University of Michigan Cancer Center, Ann Arbor, Mich.
Dr. Hayes has disclosed that he receives research support from Veridex, which markets CellSearch.