The development of personalized cancer therapy depends on a robust system to monitor the patient's individual response to anticancer treatment. Anticancer drug efficacy has been tested on circulating tumor cells (CTCs) derived from patient blood samples after ex vivo expansion into CTC clusters. Current attempts to culture these primary cancer cells focus on long-term maintenance under growth factor supplements into cell lines, which usually takes >6 months and results in a CTC expansion efficiency of <20%. We recently developed a simple but unique microfluidics-based culture approach that requires minimal preprocessing (∼30 min) and does not require prior enrichment of CTCs or depend on the use of growth factor supplements. The approach capitalizes on co-culture of immune cells from the same patient blood sample within specially designed microwells that promote CTC cluster formation within 2 weeks, with an overall cluster formation success rate of ∼50%. Drug screening is facilitated by the incorporation of a gradient generator for parallel exposure to two or more drugs at various concentrations. Owing to the cost-effectiveness and less-invasive nature of this procedure, routine monitoring of disease progression can be achieved. The described microfluidics system can be operated with a single syringe pump to introduce drug compounds (which takes ∼6 min), followed by incubation of the CTC clusters for 48 h before analysis. In addition to its applications in biomedical research, the rapid readout of our platform will enable clinicians to assess or predict a patient's response to various therapeutic strategies, so as to enable personalized or precision therapy.

中文翻译：

---

使用CTC微流体培养设备从液体活检组织中扩增患者来源的循环肿瘤细胞。

个性化癌症治疗的发展取决于强大的系统，以监测患者对抗癌治疗的个体反应。在离体扩增成CTC簇后，已对源自患者血液样本的循环肿瘤细胞（CTC）进行了抗癌药功效测试。目前培养这些原代癌细胞的尝试着眼于在生长因子补充剂进入细胞系中的长期维持，这通常需要> 6个月的时间，导致CTC扩增效率<20％。我们最近开发了一种简单但独特的基于微流控的培养方法，该方法需要最少的预处理（约30分钟），并且不需要事先富集CTC或依赖于生长因子补充剂的使用。该方法利用了在2个星期内促进CTC簇形成的特殊设计的微孔中，来自相同患者血液样本的免疫细胞的共培养，总簇形成成功率约为50％。通过并入梯度发生器以平行暴露于两种或多种不同浓度的药物，可以促进药物筛选。由于该方法的成本效益和侵入性较小，因此可以实现疾病进展的常规监测。所描述的微流控系统可以用一个注射泵操作，以引入药物化合物（约需6分钟），然后将CTC簇孵育48小时，然后进行分析。除了其在生物医学研究中的应用之外，我们平台的快速读取功能还将使临床医生能够评估或预测患者的病情。