DGIST successfully demonstrated clinical feasibility of “simultaneous cell isolation technology” to increase accuracy in cancer diagnostics

□ Through research collaboration with the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) and CTCELLS, a research team led by Professor Minseok Kim at the Department of New Biology, the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology (DGIST; President Kunwoo Lee) ushered in a new chapter for personalized and precise cancer diagnostics using technology that can automatically and simultaneously isolate circulating tumor cells (CTC) and circulating cancer-associated fibroblasts (cCAF) from blood.

□ The research team compared three FDA-approved automated CTC isolation systems (marker-based, size-based, and hemocyte extraction–based) based on the same patient blood, and confirmed the world-leading performance of the CTCeptor technology, which was originally developed and owned by DGIST and commercialized by CTCELLS. More specifically, CTCeptor has received a great deal of attention, as it has proven to not only capture tumor cells of various sizes and markers with high efficiency but also isolate cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs), which play a critical role in the tumor microenvironment (TME).

□ Upon analyzing blood from early-stage breast cancer patients, the research team found that CTCeptor (hemocyte extraction–based) detected at least 15 times more CTCs than existing technologies, namely, CellSearch (marker-based) and Parsortix (size-based). In the same samples, CTCeptor detected cCAFs at an average frequency of about 10 times higher than CTCs and demonstrated for the first time the heterogeneity of CAF markers in blood-derived cells. The findings suggest that CTCeptor can improve the sensitivity and precision of liquid biopsy and greatly increase the accuracy of early diagnosis and treatment response monitoring.

□ In further experiments using different cancer cell lines, including breast, lung, and ovarian, and a breast cancer CTC-derived cell line, the research team confirmed that CTCeptor has a stable and high recovery rate, regardless of the cell size (13–17 μm) and EpCAM expression level. Meanwhile, the size-based filter technology has proven limitations that can decrease capture efficiency depending on cell deformability.

□ “Although liquid biopsy technology has focused on obtaining cancer information from blood for the past 25 years, this study holds significance, as it serves as the basis for identifying not only cancer but also key information about the tumor microenvironment,” said Professor Minseok Kim. “Our technology can simultaneously analyze tumor cells and microenvironment cells with a single blood sample, which will greatly contribute to increasing the success rate of new drug development and establishing personalized treatment strategies.”

□ The study was funded by the Mid-Career Project under the Individual Research Support Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea, the ERC Advanced Investigator Grant, INJURMET, and the German Cancer Foundation (DKH) Priority Program “Translational Oncology,” and the findings of the study were published as a cover story in Analytical Chemistry, an international journal, for the study’s technical and academic value.

- Corresponding Author E-mail Address : kms@dgist.ac.kr