Preliminary investigation on the correlation between circulating tumor cells and cancer stem cells in patients with breast cancer

摘要

In this study, we used anti-epithelial cell adhesion molecule binding to the epithelial cells of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) in breast cancer patients, selected the epithelial cells by magnetic-activated cell separation (MACS), then analyzed the enriched epithelial cells labeled with anti-CK-FITC, anti-CD44-PE and anti-CD24-PE-cy5 respectively by FCM. We used the standard that the CK+ cells were testified as circulating tumor cells (CTC) and the CK+ CD44+ CD24-/low cells were attributed to CTC-cancer stem cells (CTC-CSC) in breast cancer patients respectively. The results indicated that the CK+ tumor cells were detected in 19 of 26 patients and the CTC-CSC were identified in 18 of the 19 patients with CTC (94.74%), and the percentage of CTC-CSC in CTC was 19.01%. The results also suggested that the breast cancer patients with the high-rate CK+ tumor cells were in the advanced TNM stage III and the patients with the low-rate CK+ cells were in the modest TNM stage I respectively. The difference between the two groups was statistically significant (p< 0.001). We concluded that there was a significant correlation between CTC and CTC-CSC in breast cancer metastasis.