Single-Cell CTC Profiling Reveals Tumour Heterogeneity Beyond What ctDNA Can Capture
This Nature Reviews Cancer article makes the case that single-cell analysis of circulating tumour cells provides unique insights into tumour heterogeneity that bulk ctDNA analysis cannot deliver. By interrogating DNA, RNA, proteins, and metabolites at single-cell resolution, CTC profiling offers a complementary liquid biopsy dimension for understanding spatial and temporal tumour evolution. The authors review how these multi-omic single-cell approaches are advancing our understanding of cancer heterogeneity as a driver of therapy resistance.
The original study
Unravelling tumour heterogeneity by single-cell profiling of circulating tumour cells.
- Authors
- Keller L, Pantel K
- Journal
- Nature reviews. Cancer
- Type
- Journal Article, Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't, Review
- PMID
- 31455893
Original abstract
Single-cell technologies have contributed to unravelling tumour heterogeneity, now considered a hallmark of cancer and one of the main causes of tumour resistance to cancer therapies. Liquid biopsy (LB), defined as the detection and analysis of cells or cell products released by tumours into the blood, offers an appealing minimally invasive approach that allows the characterization and monitoring of tumour heterogeneity in individual patients. Here, we will review and discuss how circulating tumour cell (CTC) analysis at single-cell resolution provides unique insights into tumour heterogeneity that are not revealed by analysis of circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) derived from LBs. The molecular analysis of CTCs provides complementary information to that of genomic aberrations determined using ctDNA to fully describe many different cellular components (for example, DNA, RNA, proteins and metabolites) that can influence tumour heterogeneity.