Fig. 3

Overview of CTC isolation, detection, characterization and clinical utility. Schematic illustrating various methods of CTC isolation and detection. CTCs must be filtered out from the rest of the cells in the blood like WBCs, RBCs, etc. (a) Isolation and enrichment methods include assays based on physical properties (like size, density, etc.) of CTCs, their tendency to bind/not bind antibodies and microfluidic properties that assist in filtering out CTCs from rest of the cells in the sample like plasma or serum. (b) Detection and characterization of CTCs involve various techniques that employ primers requiring prior information of gene sequence (left) relative to those are exclusively deep sequencing-based (right). PARE: Personalized analysis of rearranged ends; TAm-Seq: tagged amplicon deep sequencing; CAPP-Seq: Cancer personalized profiling by deep sequencing; Safe-SeqS: safe sequencing system; BEAMing: beads, emulsion, amplification & magnetic and draw clinically relevant information regarding tumors. (c) The section summarizes the application of CTCs in clinical oncology