Emmanouil Karteris
Brunel University, UK
Title: Liquid biopsies: A multitude of potential clinical applications for cancer patients
Biography
Biography: Emmanouil Karteris
Abstract
Over the past years, the concept of liquid biopsies has been introduced as an alternative to a conventional tissue biopsy. However, identifying circulating tumour cells (CTCs) in multiple ways from lung cancer patients based on EpCAM as the identifiable antigen (Ag), or other enrichment technologies has met with limited success. Here we report a holistic approach interrogating liquid biopsies using CTC enumeration and characterization, DNA Integrity Index and gene expression (RNA seq) from total blood. CTC enumeration from healthy controls and lung cancer (LC) patients was generated using Imagestream™, a multispectral imaging flow cytometry system. Changes in gene expression from total blood RNA were assessed from 3 LC-matched tissue and blood samples, with three matched tissue and blood samples from controls; using RNA sequencing. Moreover, plasma samples were collected from 29 LC patients and 19 controls and Alu repeat ratio and confounders were measured. CTCs were seen in all LC patients. We report significantly higher levels of CTCs (based on pan-cytokeratin marker) in LC patients compared to controls; these levels were associated with a poorer prognosis. Using RNA seq, we identified 272 genes differentially expressed in the tumour tissue compared to controls, and 335 in cancer blood samples compared to control bloods. Of all these, 21 genes have statistical significant expression differences between sample and control in both tissue and blood samples. Finally, a higher DNA Integrity Index was seen in advanced LC cases compared to both early stage and controls. In this study, we provide evidence that the presence of genetic tumour material in the blood opens the potential for liquid biomarker discovery and in some instances might work as a surrogate to tissue biopsies.