Circulating tumour cell (CTC) analysis holds enormous promise for precision cancer diagnostics. So why hasn’t it become a standard clinical tool?
The answer lies in three fundamental limitation of legacy CTC systems.
First, too few cells are being isolated. Without sufficient cell numbers, the data generated is simply not robust enough to inform clinical decisions with confidence. This is even more limiting when clinicians need repeat measurements over time to track response or resistance from tumour biology.
Second, the cells, that are isolated, are not viable. Dead cells cannot be used for drug sensitivity testing – which means clinicians lose one of the most valuable opportunities that CTC analysis could offer: the ability to test which treatments a patient’s own tumour cells will respond to before committing to a course of therapy.
Third, many of the legacy systems could not assess CTC cell surface markers; which is critical as these markers can guide therapy selection, and without them, a significant dimension of clinical insight is lost. In practice, this could mean losing the ability to match patients to the most effective therapy.
These aren’t peripheral technical challenges. They are the core reasons CTC diagnostics has remained on the fringes of oncology despite decades of research.
Frontier Diagnostics is developing technology specifically designed to overcome each of these barriers – and bring CTC analysis where it belongs: into routine clinical care.
