Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) and Circulating Endothelial Cells (CECs)

As part of our collaborations with pharmaceutical companies, Source MDx is well positioned to utilize Precision Profiles™ to characterize rare cell populations isolated from cancer patients. Source MDx uses the Veridex CellSearch™ System (Johnson & Johnson) to enrich CTCs from patients for enumeration and gene expression profiling across cancers of epithelial origin, including prostate, colon, pancreatic and ovarian. Source MDx funded prospective studies in cancer with leading academic/medical research institutions including Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital, continue to investigate the enumeration of CTCs in these patient populations and more importantly address the potential utility and accompanying challenges of enrichment and gene expression characterization of these circulating rare cell populations. Application of RNA transcript-based gene expression profiling in the characterization of CTCs holds promise in the development of targeted cancer therapies for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, particularly when further augmented by other approaches including CTC genotyping and potential in-vitro CTC culturing and drug response studies.

These and other studies are further complemented by Source MDx's ongoing efforts in the enumeration and characterization of CECs in healthy normal subject populations. These efforts further strengthen Source MDx's position as a leader in understanding normal subject populations at the molecular level and extend unique baseline knowledge to other relevant disease areas, particularly cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases.