ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) — People diagnosed with early-stage cancer have a greater chance at beating it. But when that cancer has spread, the odds are much lower. For example, the five-year survival rate for someone with stage one colon cancer is 92 percent. But the five-year survival rate for someone with stage four is just 12 percent. There is a team of researchers working to stop these dangerous cancer cells from spreading.
Beth McCaw-McKinney did everything right.
“She ate healthy. She exercised. She always did her breast cancer examinations, pap smears. All that was on time,” said her sister, Cathy McCaw-Engelman.
But then at age 53 she had her first colonoscopy …
“They found a grapefruit-sized tumor in her colon. It was already in her lymph nodes and basically had spread.” McCaw-Engelman continued.
Doctors gave Beth three months to live. She lived three years. Professor Annette Khaled and her team study metastatic cancer cells and are looking to help people like Beth. Thanks to a donation from Beth’s family, they now have a new weapon in their fight against cancer: the CellSearch system.
“CellSearch is a system that uses blood from cancer patients and we’re able to detect circulating tumor cells,” said Ana Martini, PhD, Post-Doctoral Scientist at UCF College of Medicine.
These are cancer cells that have spread to other parts of the body. The system allows them to separate, analyze and count the number of these cells. It can detect as few as two to three cancer cells in a teaspoon of blood. With that information they can try to …
“Understand what are the steps and what are the changes that cells undergo, cancer cells undergo, from the tumor to become a circulating tumor cell,” Annette Khaled, PhD, Professor of Medicine and Head of the Cancer Research Division at Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences at UCF College of Medicine explained.
And look into …
“How we can develop therapies to inhibit or prevent these circulating tumor cells,” Khaled said.
And stop the spread of cancer in its track.
The CellSearch system is FDA- approved for clinical purposes and has been around for ten years but only a handful of institutions have one. According to Khaled, doctors can test the number of circulating tumor cells to determine how far a person’s cancer has advanced with the hope to determine if a particular therapy is working.
Contributors to this news report include: Milvionne Chery, Field Producer; Roque Correa, Videographer; Cyndy McGrath, Supervising Producer; Hayley Hudson, Assistant Producer; Roque Correa, Editor.
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MEDICAL BREAKTHROUGHS
RESEARCH SUMMARY
TOPIC: CELLSEARCH COUNTS CANCER CELLS
REPORT: MB #4477
BACKGROUND: The CellSearch system’s use is to predict progression-free survival and overall survival in patients with metastatic breast, colorectal, or prostate cancer. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs), which are extremely rare in individuals without malignancy, are present at a wide range of frequencies in patients with various metastatic carcinomas. The assessment of CTCs may assist physicians in monitoring and predicting cancer progression in patients with metastatic cancer. In particular, clinical studies have focused on metastatic breast, colorectal, and prostate cancer. The number of CTCs determined using the CellSearch assay has been found to be a significant independent predictor of progression-free survival (PFS) and/or overall survival (OS) in patients with metastatic breast, colorectal, or prostate cancer. In addition, detection of elevated CTCs at any time during therapy has been shown to be an accurate indicator of rapid disease progression and shorter survival.
(Source: https://www.questdiagnostics.com/testcenter/testguide.action?dc=TS_CellSearch)
DIAGNOSING: The machines (CELLSEARCH System) have been FDA-approved since 2004 and remain the gold standard for isolating and counting individual circulating tumor cells in blood. The UCF College of Medicine is only the second research entity in Florida with the machines. The other CELLSEARCH system is at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. Annette Khaled, who leads the College of Medicine’s cancer research division, recently began using the machines to test blood samples from 48 women with metastatic breast cancer who are being treated at Orlando Health’s UF Cancer Center. The first stage of Khaled’s research is to isolate and count the number of circulating tumor cells in the patient’s blood to evaluate the progress the cancer is making. The next step will be to study the makeup of the cells and how they respond to a new therapy Khaled has developed through funding from the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
(Source: https://today.ucf.edu/med-school-can-see-count-cancer-cells-blood-thanks-patients-family/)
TECHNOLOGY: Critics point out that the CellSearch only detects EpCAM+ cells, thereby missing CTC lacking EpCAM expression. Still the CellSearch system remains the gold standard for CTC enumeration and has set the bar quite high. Over the years several alternative technologies have been developed, reviewed extensively and demonstrated to detect CTC both by targeting EpCAM and not targeting EpCAM but using other characteristics such as physical properties or biological features. However, up until now it remains difficult to compare these technologies due to the lack of a uniform CTC definition.
(Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574789115002380)
FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THIS REPORT, PLEASE CONTACT:
Christin Senior, PR, UCF
407-266-1416
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