Abstract
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the second highest cause of cancer mortality worldwide, high incidence of recurrence and metastasis remains the major reason. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) shedding into the bloodstream, although extremely rare, underlies the blood-borne dissemination of cancer metastasis. Thus, a simple, rapid, low-cost and high sensitive detection of EpCAM+ HCC-CTCs with high metastatic potential is of great importance in the early diagnostic, prognostic, and drug efficacy evaluation of HCC. However, limitations exist in most current HCC-CTCs detection methods like single detection target, multi-step operation and high cost. Multi-step operation may cause CTCs loss and reduce the detection sensitivity, which greatly limits the practical application of HCC-CTCs detection. Therefore, a simple, rapid, low-cost, highly sensitive and highly selective detection method for HCC-CTCs is urgent to be developed. In this work, we assemble HCC cell-surface targeted fluorescent polymer with EpCAM antibody modified graphene film to achieve high-sensitivity optical detection of EpCAM+ HCC-CTCs while successfully capturing CTCs. This method increases detection target, reduces operation steps, thus the selectivity and sensitivity of the detection method is improved, which successfully detects EpCAM+ HCC-CTCs in the blood samples of different stages of HCC patients. This method has great potential in the application of HCC early diagnosis, prognosis and development of drug efficacy evaluation kits.
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