Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

Circulating tumour cells (CTCs) are cells released from a primary tumour into the bloodstream of a patient and have been implicated in metastasis. Monitoring these cells represents a means to monitor a patient's disease progression without the need for invasive tissue sampling. These cells, however, are extremely rare with single-digit cell counts existing in a background of billions of blood cells. It is therefore very challenging to isolate these cells. We have developed a novel device that is capable of not only capturing these cells from a patient's blood sample, but also sorting these cells based on their surface proteins. In this proposal we aim to use the expression levels of these surface proteins to characterize the propensity of certain subpopulations of CTCs to metastasize and form tumours elsewhere in the body. In addition we will expand the utility of this device to profile CTCs based on multiple markers simultaneously. This knowledge, along with high-resolution population profiling of CTCs, may prove to be a powerful tool for clinicians in the management and treatment of cancer.