Development of diagnosis system for circulating tumor cells

2021 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 19H04495
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Section: 一般
• Review Section: Basic Section 90130:Medical systems-related
• Research Institution: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
• Principal Investigator: Kataoka Masatoshi 国立研究開発法人産業技術総合研究所, 生命工学領域, 上級主任研究員 (20224438)
• Project Period (FY): 2019-04-01 – 2022-03-31
• Keywords: 細胞単層配列 / 免疫多重染色 / 循環がん細胞 / 一細胞PCR

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Circulating tumor cells (CTC) that are released from the primary cancer and circulate in the blood to work on the formation of metastatic lesions in distant organs and can be used to determine the prognosis and therapeutic effect. We have developed a plate-wide cell monolayer arrangement method capable of multiple immunostaining independing the expression of EpCAM that can apply CTC to accurate quantitative detection, and a cell tweezers that can recover a target cell. CTC that can respond to the diversity of cancer cells by arranging about 10 million leukocytes on the entire surface of flat acryl plate in a single layer and then performing immune multiple staining including epithelial markers. We created a substrate that can be quantitatively detected and the position can be specified at the single cell level. In addition, we have developed tweezers for cells that can recover one cell, and have succeeded in analyzing genes by single-cell PCR.

Free Research Field

医工連携

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

唯一FDAで認可されているCTC検出デバイスであるセルサーチシステムでは、上皮細胞マーカーEpCAMによる細胞濃縮過程が必要で、がん細胞の多様性によるEpCAM低発現のCTCを見逃すことが知られている。本課題で開発した平板全面細胞単層配列法では多重免疫染色による標的細胞の検出・位置特定化が可能で、EpCAMに依存しないがん細胞検出により正確なCTCの定量検出と細胞ピンセットによる一細胞回収技術を利用したがん細胞の遺伝子発現解析により、薬剤耐性や分化度の判定などより詳細ながん診断応用が期待できる。