Recent progress in the application of circulating tumor cells in the diagnosis and treatment of colorectal cancer / 中华检验医学杂志

ABSTRACT

Colorectal cancer (CRC), as one of the most common gastrointestinal malignancy, is original from the epithelial/endothelial cells of colorectal tissues. CRC is one of the highest incidence and mortality rates of any malignancy in humans today. Moving forward the early diagnosis window of colorectal cancer, dynamic monitoring of the risk of postoperative recurrence and metastasis, early intervention is of great value in improving the diagnosis and treatment outcome of colorectal cancer. The clinical diagnosis of CRC via circulating tumor cells (CTC) has been considered as one of the fast, noninvasive, reproducible liquid biopsy methods, and it has been widely used in the early diagnosis, treatment monitoring and prognosis evaluation of colorectal cancer. This review systematically expounded the applied research values of CTC counting, protein expression (phosphatase of regenerating liver-3, matrix metalloproteinase, etc), molecular characterization (adenomatous polyp of colon, erb-b2 receptor tyrosine kinase, etc), mRNA expression profile and single cell sequencing in the diagnosis and treatment of colorectal cancer, in order to assist clinical in rational use of CTC monitoring indicators and provide support for improving the prognosis of colorectal cancer.