Live single cell mass spectrometry reveals cancer‐specific metabolic profiles of circulating tumor cells

Summary

Recently, there has been an increased attention to circulating tumor cells (CTCs) analysis, also known as liquid biopsy, owing to its potential benefits in cancer diagnosis and treatment. CTCs are released from primary tumor lesions into the blood stream and eventually metastasize to distant body organs. However, a major hurdle with CTC analysis is their natural scarcity. Existing methods lack sensitivity, specificity or reproducibility required in CTC characterization and detection. Here, we report untargeted molecular profiling of single CTCs obtained from gastric cancer (GC) and colorectal cancer (CRC) patients, using live single cell mass spectrometry (LSC‐MS) integrated with microfluidics‐based cell enrichment technique. Using this approach, we demonstrated the difference in the metabolomic profile between CTCs originating from different cancer groups. Moreover, potential biomarkers were putatively annotated to be specific to each cancer type.

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