BioCentury
ARTICLE | Tools & Techniques

Getting personal with CTCs

August 7, 2014 7:00 AM UTC

One of oncology's goals is to tailor cancer treatments for individual patients, which requires technologies to predict what drugs will work for a patient and monitor how a tumor changes over time. A team from Massachusetts General Hospital has developed a method based on circulating tumor cells that could reveal both drug susceptibility and mutational changes. But it is not clear if the process can be turned from a research tool to a diagnostic for the clinic.1

Johnson & Johnson has licensed the CTC-iChip technology from MGH. The company plans to commercialize the technology, initially as a research-only application. "This will allow users to culture CTCs [circulating tumor cells], further interrogate them and test them for resistance to therapeutic agents," said Robert McCormack, head of technology innovation at J&J's Janssen Diagnostics LLC. The company supported the work, which uses its CTC-iChip circulating tumor cell isolation platform...