Rare Cell Technology
What if a simple blood test could detect cancer earlier, identify a disease stage, track response to therapy, predict recurrence, and guide therapy choices?
Detection of cancer cells in blood is an important tool for diagnosis and monitoring of solid tumors in early stages, as well as during and post-therapy. SRI employs a rare cell detection to characterize and identify new predictive protein biomarkers on circulating tumor cells (CTC) from patient blood samples.
Detection of CTCs from a simple blood draw could provide diagnostic assays to guide the oncologist to optimize therapy for cancer patients from markers on CTCs and in realtime. However, traditional technologies cannot reliably detect the extremely low concentrations of these rare cells. Our solution: the fiber‐optic array scanning technology (FAST) cytometer, which applies laser-printing techniques to the rare cell detection problem.
The FAST cytometer, invented at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and now in development at SRI, quickly scans a very broad field of labeled blood cells on a planar substrate. The laser and fiber‐optic bundle system can scan 25 million cells a minute. CTCs located by the FAST scan are identified and imaged using an automated digital microscope (ADM).
The FAST cytometer is minimally invasive. It can be useful to identify biomarkers for prognosis, for therapy selection, and to promote more personalized therapies for cancer.
SRI plans to assess whether CTC-directed targeted therapy results in a decrease in CTCs as a surrogate marker for efficacy. A pilot prospective clinical trial will be designed to guide treatment based on actionable discordance for key breast cancer biomarkers.
