Improvement of treatment outcomes for patients with solid tissue tumors depends on the drug?s ability to target the genetic mutations responsible for tumor growth. Currently, mutational analysis requires an invasive tissue biopsy, which is clinically impractical to perform repeatedly. Alternatively, extracting Circulating Tumor Cells (CTC) - cancer cells released into the bloodstream by the primary tumor - for molecular analysis offers an attractive strategy for genotyping patient-specific tumors and mutations. The goal of this project is to demonstrate and validate a procedure that marries high efficiency microfluidic capture with integrated DNA amplification to allow direct detection of the driver mutations in a lung cancer model. The reproducibility and accuracy of the mutation profiling procedure will be validated in spiked samples. Furthermore, the procedure will be tested to elaborate the surface markers used to capture CTC in spiked and clinical samples. In this way, the flexibility of the procedure will also be assessed. This will produce a fundamentally enabling technology for predictive cancer tests in personalized medicine with application in many solid tumor models.
