Abstract
Oral squamous cell carcinomas are among the 10 most common cancers and have a 50% lethality rate after 5 years. Despite easy access to the oral cavity for cancer screening, the main limitations to successful treatment are uncertain prognostic criteria for (pre-)malignant lesions. Identifying a functional cellular marker may represent a significant improvement for diagnosis and treatment. Toward this goal, mechanical phenotyping of individual cells is a novel approach to detect cytoskeletal changes, which are diagnostic for malignant change. The compliance of cells from cell lines and primary samples of healthy donors and cancer patients was measured using a microfluidic optical stretcher. Cancer cells showed significantly different mechanical behavior, with a higher mean deformability and increased variance. Cancer cells (n approximately 30 cells measured from each patient) were on average 3.5 times more compliant than those of healthy donors [D(normal) = (4.43 +/- 0.68) 10(-3) Pa(-1); D(cancer) = (15.8 +/- 1.5) 10(-3) Pa(-1); P < 0.01]. The diagnosis results of the patient samples were confirmed by standard histopathology. The generality of these findings was supported by measurements of two normal and four cancer oral epithelial cell lines. Our results indicate that mechanical phenotyping is a sensible, label-free approach for classifying cancer cells to enable broad screening of suspicious lesions in the oral cavity. It could in principle be applied to any cancer to aid conventional diagnostic procedures.
Highlights
Oral squamous cell carcinomas (OSCC) are among the 10 most common cancers in the world [1]
Despite great efforts in handling oral cancer, the prognosis for many patients is devastating with a 5-year survival rate below 50%
The aim of this study was to evaluate the potential for compliance measurements of individual cells to assess oral lesions and to distinguish between normal keratinocytes and squamous cancer cells from the oral cavity
Summary
Oral squamous cell carcinomas (OSCC) are among the 10 most common cancers in the world [1]. Due to difficulties with early clinical and histologic diagnosis and lack of an unequivocal molecular marker for clinical outcome, the death rate for this particular cancer is higher than for cutaneous malignant melanomas or cervical cancer [1, 2]. Despite great efforts in handling oral cancer, the prognosis for many patients is devastating with a 5-year survival rate below 50%. Earlier diagnosis is currently the most promising avenue for improving survival rates but can only be achieved by means of targeted screening measures applied on a broad scale provided that appropriate diagnostic procedures are available. Note: Supplementary data for this article are available at Cancer Research Online (http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/).
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