Aptamer-Mediated Nanostructured Surfaces For Hepatocellular Circulating Tumor Cells Enrichment And Its Clinical Application

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have been considered as the origin of cancer metastasis. Thus, detection of CTCs in peripheral blood is of great value in different types of solid tumors. However, owing to extremely low abundance of CTCs, detection of them has been technically challenging. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common malignant tumors in the world and its lethality ranking the third, most of HCC related death was cuased by recurrence and metastasis. It was in the early period of HCC that hepatoma cells began to invase and metastasizeize into peripheral circulating. Thus, to establish a simple and efficient method for CTCs detection in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), we applied biocompatible and transparent HA/CTS nanofilm to achieve enhanced topographic interactions with nanoscale cellular surface components, and we used sLex-AP (aptamer for carbohydrate sialyl Lewis X) to coat onto HA/CTS nanofilm for efficient capture of hepatocellular circulating tumor cells. These two functional components combined to form our CTC-BloTChip platform. Using this platform, we realized hepatocellular circulating tumor cells capture and identification, the average recovery rate was 61.6% or more at each spiking level. Importantly, our platform identified CTCs (2±2 per 2 mL) in 25 of 42 (59.5%) HCC patients. Moreover, both the positivity rate and the number of detected CTCs were significantly correlated with tumor size, portal vein tumor thrombus, and the TNM (tumor-node-metastasis) stage. In summary, our CTC-BloTChip platform provides a new method allowing for simple but efficient detection of CTCs in HCC patients, and it holds potential of clinically usefulness in monitoring HCC prognosis and guiding individualized treatment in the future.