This review aims to provide in-depth insights into CTC analysis, including various techniques for isolation of CTCs and single-cell analysis of CTCs, as well as current developmental trends and promising research directions.

Minimal residual disease (MRD) offers a highly independent prognostic factor for leukemia patients. However, challenges confronting conventional MRD assays are high invasiveness, as well as limited detection sensitivity and clinical applicability. Inspired by the self‐adaptive skeleton and multiple suckers or tendrils of climbing plants, a biomimetic Multivalent Aptamer Nanoclimber (MANC)‐functionalized microfluidic chip (MANC‐Chip) is reported for minimally invasive, highly sensitive and clinically applicable MRD detection in the peripheral blood of T‐cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients. The MANCs are synthesized by a simple co‐polymerization reaction. Due to their flexible structure and cooperative multivalent effect, MANCs dramatically enhance the binding affinity of aptamers targeting leukemia cells. A deterministic lateral displacement‐patterned microfluidic chip is designed to further increase the collision probability between MANCs and leukemia cells. Benefiting from the synergistic effect of multivalent binding and enhanced collision, a high capture efficiency of 92.2% for leukemia cells is achieved. Moreover, the captured leukemia cells can be released with high efficiency of 88.9% and high viability of 93.8% via nuclease treatment prior to downstream analysis. Overall, the excellent features of MANC‐Chip make it very useful for precise detection of MRD and better understanding of leukemia.

Our results suggest that EPO exerts preventive cardioprotective effects on DOX-induced cardiomyopathy via anti-apoptotic pathways. The up-regulation of Bcl-2 protein expression may contribute to this.

Cyclin D1 is a key protein involved in cell cycle regulation. A common A870G single nucleotide polymorphism in exon 4 of the cyclin D1 gene (CCND1) has an effect on the transcription of 2 different cyclin D1 messenger RNAs. Correlation between genetic polymorphism of A870G of CCND1 and clinical outcome among patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) has been reported. However, the effect on ALL occurrence remains unclear. To examine the genotypic frequency of CCND1 polymorphism, we performed a case-control study in a Chinese population of 183 children with ALL and 190 healthy controls. The genetic frequency of CCND1 had a significant overall correlation in patients and controls. The AA genotype of CCND1 showed a tendency to increase ALL risk 3.2898-fold compared with the AG + GG genotype (P = .0207). Stratification of patients according to cell type, risk level, and chemotherapeutic response showed significance for the AA genotype in T-cell ALL, ALL with high risk, and no complete remission (P = .047, P = .011, and P = .007, respectively). No gene dosage effect was observed in this study. The results of the present study suggested that CCND1 genetic polymorphism may be related to the occurrence of ALL in a population of Chinese children.