Abstract

Single-Cell Transcriptome Analysis For Circulating Tumor Cells based on Microcavity Array

Tomoko Yoshino, Professor, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are one of the powerful biomarkers for cancer diagnosis and potential targets for drug discovery. Genetic analysis of CTCs could provide detailed information of cancer patient. However, the recovery of such extremely rare cells from the peripheral blood and the achievement of genetic analysis without loss of CTCs presents a technical challenge. In this presentation, I will introduce several techniques towards single-cell transcriptome analysis for CTCs. Filtration using metal microfilters (microcavity array: MCA) has been used to develop precise CTC recovery technique. Furthermore, recovered cells on the MCA is easily manipulated by encapsulation by photopolymerizable hydrogel using multiple light projection system, resulting in simply manipulate multiple CTCs at a single cell level. The cells were applied RNA-seq analysis, and we investigated single cell gene expression analysis to reveal the cancer-specific transcripts. We believe our system have a potential to apply high-throughput single-CTC analysis and contribute for development of non-invasive cancer diagnosis method.