Metastasis is the leading cause of mortality in cancer patients. To improve the survival rate for patients with metastatic disease early diagnosis and accurate prognosis is essential. However, currently there is a lack of accurate, efficient and sensitive diagnostic methods for metastatic disease. Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) are cells in the blood that have detached from the tumor and have the potential to form metastasis. Enumeration and characterization of CTCs therefore has great potential to advance personalized medicine using CTCs as bio-markers for prognosis and treatment monitoring, and as predictors of individual therapeutic responses. With the efforts spent within the project A CACTUS, a radically new approach for enumerating and isolating CTCs, based on the fact that the metabolic properties of cancer cells differ markedly from normal cells, has been developed. With this approach, individual CTCs can be isolated (using a highly innovative picodroplet-based technology), subsequently analysed and further characterized. In this project the groundbreaking technologies from biochemistry and microfluidics led to a working prototype for CTCs detection. This new approach not only intends to spread the accessibility of CTCs enumeration for diagnostic purposes, but will also enable further characterization of CTCs for the development and use of new targeted therapies. To do this A CACTUS has focused its attention on the improvement of the platform, by improving the single cell detection method, developing a high-throughput prototype instrument and by demonstrating its potential in the clinic. Based on the project results, two instruments have been built and set in two hospitals: the results obtained from oncological patient's samples look promising in the direction of accurate prognosis and treatment monitoring.
