Nanomaterial-Based Immunocapture Platforms for the Recognition, Isolation, and Detection of Circulating Tumor Cells

Abstract

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are a type of cancer cells that circulate in the peripheral blood after breaking away from solid tumors and are essential for the establishment of distant metastasis. Up to 90% of cancer-related deaths are caused by metastatic cancer. As a new type of liquid biopsy, detecting and analyzing CTCs will provide insightful information for cancer diagnosis, especially the in-time disease status, which would avoid some flaws and limitations of invasive tissue biopsy. However, due to the extremely low levels of CTCs among a large number of hematologic cells, choosing immunocapture platforms for CTC detection and isolation will achieve good performance with high purity, selectivity, and viability. These properties are directly associated with precise downstream analysis of CTC profiling. Recently, inspired by the nanoscale interactions of cells in the tissue microenvironment, platforms based on nanomaterials have been widely explored to efficiently enrich and sensitively detect CTCs. In this review, various immunocapture platforms based on different nanomaterials for efficient isolation and sensitive detection of CTCs are outlined and discussed. First, the design principles of immunoaffinity nanomaterials are introduced in detail. Second, the immunocapture and release of platforms based on nanomaterials ranging from nanoparticles, nanostructured substrates, and immunoaffinity microfluidic chips are summarized. Third, recent advances in single-cell release and analysis of CTCs are introduced. Finally, some perspectives and challenges are provided in future trends of CTC studies.

Molecular Biomarkers in Cancer

“…The detection methods include those based on their physical characteristics, such as large cell size, electrical properties (e.g., CTCs can have a more negative charge compared to leukocytes [ 93 ]), or immunological properties, which can help to identify surface proteins on CTCs. Currently, nanomaterials are being tested to increase the efficiency of immuno-capture and detection [ 94 ]. As their number is increased in metastatic disease, they have use in monitoring metastatic breast cancer, CRC, and prostate cancer.…”

Recent Advances of Microfluidic Platform for Cell Based Non-Invasive Prenatal Diagnosis

“…For a biological approach, antibodies against specific markers of fetal cells were used to isolate fetal cells from background cells [ 32 ]. The immunoaffinity technique is the most common method of biological approach [ 33 ].…”

“…Recent advances in nanomaterials and fabrication technology of nanostructured biochips provide considerable advantages to detect and isolate CRCs by using immunoaffinity based nanostructured microfluidic devices with high purity, high sensitivity, and high efficiency [ 33 ]. The immunoaffinity approach is the most common microfluidic method to isolate CFCs for NIPD.…”

Liquid Biopsy in Cancer: Focus on Lymphoproliferative Disorders

“…CTCs detection, unfortunately, requires complex enrichment techniques, on the basis of both biological (i.e., specific antibody affinity) and physical properties (i.e., selecting them through size or deformability) [ 86 , 87 ]. Similarly to cfDNA, the amount of CTCs compared to the number of normal nucleated blood cells is very low: this has represented a major challenge that could affect the reliability of the results [ 88 ].…”