Polymer Nanofiber‐Embedded Microchips for Detection, Isolation, and Molecular Analysis of Single Circulating Melanoma Cells

The early detection of cancer can significantly reduce cancer mortality and saves lives. Thus, a great deal of effort has been devoted to the exploration of new technologies to detect early signs of the disease. Cancer biomarkers cover a broad range of biochemical entities, such as nucleic acids, proteins, sugars, small metabolites, and cytogenetic and cytokinetic parameters, as well as entire tumour cells found in the body fluid. They can be used for risk assessment, diagnosis, prognosis, and for the prediction of treatment efficacy and toxicity and recurrence. In this review, we provide an overview of recent advances in cancer biomarker detection. Several representative examples using different approaches for each biomarker have been reviewed, and all these cases demonstrate that the multidisciplinary technology-based cancer diagnostics are becoming an increasingly relevant alternative to traditional techniques. In addition, we also discuss the unsolved problems and future challenges in the evaluation of cancer biomarkers. Clearly, solving these hurdles requires great effort and collaboration from different communities of chemists, physicists, biologists, clinicians, material-scientists, and engineering and technical researchers. A successful outcome will result in the realization of point-of-care diagnosis and individualized treatment of cancers by non-invasive and convenient tests in the future.

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“…18A). 307 The harvested singe CMCs could be used for a subsequent Sanger sequence analysis ( Fig. 18A-g).…”

Section: Direct Analysis Of Cancer Cellsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cancer biomarker detection: recent achievements and challenges

2015

Chem. Soc. Rev.

1,021

586

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“…A recent report described a method to detect and isolate single circulating melanoma cells that integrates a polymer-nanofiber-embedded nanovelcro cell-affinity assay with a laser microdissection (LMD) technique. This method not only separates melanoma CTCs from peripheral blood, but also allows sequencing of individual cells for specific mutations [339]. …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pathways and therapeutic targets in melanoma

et al. 2014

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This review aims to summarize the current knowledge of molecular pathways and their clinical relevance in melanoma. Metastatic melanoma was a grim diagnosis, but in recent years tremendous advances have been made in treatments. Chemotherapy provided little benefit in these patients, but development of targeted and new immune approaches made radical changes in prognosis. This would not have happened without remarkable advances in understanding the biology of disease and tremendous progress in the genomic (and other “omics”) scale analyses of tumors. The big problems facing the field are no longer focused exclusively on the development of new treatment modalities, though this is a very busy area of clinical research. The focus shifted now to understanding and overcoming resistance to targeted therapies, and understanding the underlying causes of the heterogeneous responses to immune therapy.

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“…4 Various methods have been developed to capture circulating tumor cells (CTCs), such as size or antibody-based microfluidics chips, [5][6][7][8][9] nano-micro interface based substrates. [10][11][12][13] Circulating tumor cell clusters in the blood are more important because they are oligoclonal precursors of cancer metastasis, such as breast cancer 14 . Compared with single CTC, CTC clusters have at least 20-fold increased metastatic potential 14 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%