A Probe can Capture Circulating Tumor Cells (CTC) – An Antitumor Antibody based Capture Technique

Circulating Tumor Cells (CTC's) serve as a best indicator of underlying cancer.It provides information about the cancer from where they arise and can be used as a tool for diagnosis, treatment and prognosis.The study was conducted with a objective to find a suitable, cost effective technique to capture CTC's and to develop minimal invasive method for diagnosing tumor/cancer.In the present study polystyrene was used as a matrix to capture circulating tumor cells by using EpCAM antibodies.Tumor cells were spiked in to the canine blood, used for binding assay.FITC tagged cytokeratin was used to label and identify bound tumor cells.We found that tumor cells bound to the antibody coated polystyrene matrix even at low concentrations.Hence this technique can be efficiently be used as a probe to detect cancer.