. 2017 Nov 22;10(2):65–77. doi: 10.1177/1756287217742564

Table 1.

Applications of the CellSearch system in urogenital malignancies.

Prostate cancer

- CTCs detected in patients with metastatic prostate cancer:
⩾2 CTCs in 57% of metastatic PCa blood samples, 14% of which contained ⩾50 CTCs whereas these were extremely rare in healthy subjects⁶
- Independent correlation between CTCs blood concentration detected by CellSearch system and OS.^10–16
- No correlation between CTCs levels and response to treatment^18–20

Urothelial carcinoma

- CellSearch system has shown to be a sensible and reliable technique for the identification of CTCs in patients with metastatic urothelial carcinoma but it has not been validated in this setting.^43–45
- Several studies have explored the prognostic role of CTCs detected with CellSearch in localized bladder tumor with controversial results. Although the identification of at least one CTC could be a strong predictor of disease recurrence after surgery, this method has not been validated and included in clinical practice.^43–50
- In a meta-analysis investigating the diagnostic accuracy of CTC detection in early and advanced urothelial carcinoma the overall sensitivity of CTC detection was only 35.1% suggesting that this method has a limited value as first-line screening or diagnostic test.⁵¹

Renal cell carcinoma

- CellSearch system showed a very low detection rate in patients with localized and metastatic RCC.⁶ The expression of MET by RCC cancer cells resulting in a lack of epithelial adhesion molecules could partially explain the failure of this method.

CTC, circulating tumor cell; MET, mesenchymal–epithelial transition receptor/pathways; OS, overall survival; PCa, prostate cancer; RCC, renal cell carcinoma.