Abstract
Nanomaterials have great potential for the prevention and treatment of cancer. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are cancer cells of solid tumor origin entering the peripheral blood after detachment from a primary tumor. The occurrence and circulation of CTCs are accepted as a prerequisite for the formation of metastases, which is the major cause of cancer-associated deaths. Due to their clinical significance CTCs are intensively discussed to be used as liquid biopsy for early diagnosis and prognosis of cancer. However, there are substantial challenges for the clinical use of CTCs based on their extreme rarity and heterogeneous biology. Therefore, methods for effective isolation and detection of CTCs are urgently needed. With the rapid development of nanotechnology and its wide applications in the biomedical field, researchers have designed various nano-sized systems with the capability of CTCs detection, isolation, and CTCs-targeted cancer therapy. In the present review, we summarize the underlying mechanisms of CTC-associated tumor metastasis, and give detailed information about the unique properties of CTCs that can be harnessed for their effective analytical detection and enrichment. Furthermore, we want to give an overview of representative nano-systems for CTC isolation, and highlight recent achievements in microfluidics and lab-on-a-chip technologies. We also emphasize the recent advances in nano-based CTCs-targeted cancer therapy. We conclude by critically discussing recent CTC-based nano-systems with high therapeutic and diagnostic potential as well as their biocompatibility as a practical example of applied nanotechnology.
Highlights
The application of engineered nanomaterials (NMs) in technical products is steadily growing in biotechnology and biomedicine [1]
This process is determined as the dissemination of cancer cells from primary is expected to play a vital role in early tumor detection and cancer treatment
This process is separated into two steps and two different instruments: Autoprep is responsible for circulating tumor cells (CTCs) capture and immunostaining, and CellTracks Analyzer evaluates the immunofluorescent-stained cells by a semi-automated fluorescence microscope
Summary
The application of engineered nanomaterials (NMs) in technical products is steadily growing in biotechnology and biomedicine [1]. Nanomedicine, i.e., the medical application of nanotechnology, by metastasis [2,3,4,5] This process is determined as the dissemination of cancer cells from primary is expected to play a vital role in early tumor detection and cancer treatment. CTCs play an important role as part a small number of CTCs are able to evade immune attack and extravagate during the circulation at of a ‘liquid biopsy’ which can offer important information on prediction of cancer progression and distant capillary beds and seed the growth of a secondary tumor [8]. The number of detected CTCs usually correlates with the progression of cancer disease the possibility of tumor recurrence [3]. We will summarize the research progress of the development of robust nanosystems and MBs for CTC-targeted cancer therapy
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