Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

There were an estimated 171,000 new cases of cancer and over 75,000 deaths from cancer in Canada in 2009. The Canadian Cancer Society has identified that significant obstacles in increasing longevity of cancer patients are delays in diagnosis and the occurrence of secondary tumors (i.e. metastasis). The research program to be supported by the requested equipment, an integrated microscopy and micro-incubation system, is the ongoing development of our novel sorting, manipulation and analysis techniques for rare single cells. In particular, the applicants are currently developing new high-throughput, micro-array-based systems that can sort live circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from blood samples. CTCs are neoplastic cells shed from primary tumors that are found in blood. In some forms of cancer, these cells are believed to seed secondary tumors. Clinical studies have shown that CTCs are associated with cancer progression, and identifying and characterizing them in peripheral blood has the prospect of providing an early detection method. Furthermore, analysis of CTCs for specific molecular changes has the potential of identifying an effective therapy. Thus, there is much interest in methods for isolating CTCs from blood and developing better methods for CTC detection. The main technical difficulty in detecting CTCs from blood is that they are very rare (estimates of 1 to 100 cells per ml of blood). While CTCs offer the potential to dramatically shift the paradigm of early detection and treatment of metastatic cancer, currently there is a prohibitively high cost associated with screening for malignant CTCs in cancer patients' blood and the sensitivity of assays developed to identify CTCs is low. The requested high-performance motorized microscope, with the onboard cell incubation and environmental control capabilities, allows us to keep the expensive and rare CTCs cells healthy and uncontaminated, and perform high-speed image acquisition during our multi-dimensional experiments, leading to more scientifically meaningful data. The outcome of our research would be an enabling technology for reliable detection of CTCs in blood and cost-effective routine assessment of metastatic cancer patients in the clinical lab.