| CTCs are a rare type of cell involved in the early stages of cancer metastasis. CTCs are an essential biomarker for providing early cancer diagnosis, predicting disease progression, and establishing a treatment plan. CTCs can also provide critically important information about the response to treatment of various drugs. The current FDA-approved method for detecting CTCs uses EpCAM as the biomarker. However, this marker is not expressed on non-epithelial carcinomas. We selected the folate receptor, a more specific and sensitive biomarker to overcome this limitation. Through our in vitro studies, we found that incorporating rigid spacer and flexible linker into the folate conjugates could dramatically improves the cell detection yield. |
