Clinical Significance of Circulating Clonal Plasma Cells Detected by a Novel Microfluidic Chip in Multiple Myeloma

Abstract

Circulating Clonal Plasma cells (cCPCs) in peripheral blood is emerged as an important biomarker in evaluating the Minimal Residual Disease (MRD) status in Multiple myeloma (MM). The elevation of cCPCs is closely related to the recurrence of disease. Comparing to the conventional bone marrow aspirate, it can be accessed regularly in a noninvasive manner. Over the past decade, microfluidic techniques have been widely explored as a platform to segregate the rare cells in blood with the advantages of easy manipulation and low cost. Recently, we and several other groups have reported the successful development of cCPCs-specific microfluidic chip. However, there had been no comparative study of the performance of microfluidic chip to currently available clinical MRD prognostic tools, so we used our previously developed microfluidic platform to explore its clinical utility in comparison with existing methods of Multiparameter Flow Cytometry (MFC) and Serum Protein Electrophoresis analysis. The MRD test results from the 19 MM patients showed 89.47% of overall agreement between MFC and microfluidic chip. Through the monitoring of 2 MM patients before and after treatment, a similar fluctuation pattern was observed between the cCPCs level detected by microfluidic chip and the paraprotein level detected by Serum Protein Electrophoresis.