Circulating tumor microemboli (CTM) and vimentin+ circulating tumor cells (CTCs) detected by a size-based platform predict worse prognosis in advanced colorectal cancer patients during chemotherapy

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer in male and the second most common in female worldwide, and contributes the fourth cause of cancer death in male and the third in female [1]. For advanced CRC patients, although many patients benefit from chemotherapy to some extent, for some patients excessive chemotherapy was unnecessary due to inefficiency, moreover, multiple adverse effects seriously lower their life quality [2]. Therefore, new prognostic factors which could be used to identify patients who would benefit from chemotherapy are needed.

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) non-invasively isolated from peripheral blood can serve as a “liquid biopsy” and as a source of valuable tumor markers. Many studies reported that CTC detection had prognostic and therapeutic significance in CRC [3‐7]. Moreover, in advanced CRC patients, the presence of CTCs before and during treatment had been proved to be an independent predictor of progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) [3, 6], and a key factor to improve the accuracy in assessing the effectiveness of first-line treatment [7].

However, CTC detection, enumeration and molecular characterization are quite challenging, because CTCs are rare in peripheral blood of patients. The Veridex CellSearch system (Veridex LLC, Raritan, NJ) utilizes magnetic beads coated by anti-EpCAM antibody to capture cells followed by the fluorescence staining to identify CTCs, defined as CK8/18/19+/DAPI+/CD45− cells [8]. However, EpCAM expression is dependent on the local microenvironment and is down-regulated in disseminated cells [9]. Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) of tumor cells is induced in the bloodstream [10], which leads to mesenchymal tumor cells with stem-like phenotype [11, 12], and loss of epithelial phenotype [13]. This is quite probably the reason why the CTC detection rates and counts in the CellSearch system are generally low. For example, 17 of 66 non-metastatic CRC patients (26%) had ≥2 CTCs per 7.5 ml peripheral blood [14], and in another study, only 19 of 239 preoperative CRC patients (~8%) had ≥1 CTC per 7.5 ml peripheral blood [15]. Therefore, CTCs as an independent prognostic marker, need a more sensitive method to further facilitate the evaluation of CTC detection.

Here, a sensitive size-based platform for CTC isolation was applied, which could filter the hemocytes with small diameter and capture the tumor cells with relatively big diameter, followed by Romanowsky dye and immunofluorescent staining to identify CTCs. In this study, peripheral blood samples (5 ml) from 98 advanced CRC patients during 2–6 cycles chemotherapy were collected to detect CTCs for Romanowsky dye staining, then CTC levels were correlated with clinicopathological characteristics and patient’s survival. Moreover, CTC phenotype was measured by immunofluorescent staining in 32 CTCs-positive patients with advanced CRC. It was demonstrated that CTC detection by a size-based platform was positively correlated with lymphatic invasion, TNM stage, serum CEA level and poor survival, and CTM and vimentin+ CTCs predicted poorer survival in advanced CRC under treatment.

CTC detection in peripheral blood was recognized as “liquid biopsy” in solid tumors, because it could be performed easily, frequently, and less invasively [19, 20]. There was increasing evidence which prove CTCs as the clinical marker for diagnostic, prognostic, and pharmacologic purposes [21, 22]. Hence, CTC detection and characterization had become a research focus worldwide.

Although many studies about CTCs proved that high baseline CTC count was positively correlated with worse prognosis in colorectal cancer by CellSearch system [6, 23, 24], the CTC detection rate and count in CellSearch system were generally low, and many approaches of CTC isolation had been developed recently. In this study, we applied a size-based platform for CTC isolation, and the spiking tests showed the capture efficiency and sensitivity of this platform was reliable and robust. Moreover, the CTC detection rate in advanced CRC patients during 2 ~ 6 cycles chemotherapy was 49% (48 of 98 patients), which was significantly higher than that detected by CellSearch system (data showed in meta-analysis) [23, 24], and it was consistent with the results of another study which compared CTC detection rate of the size-based platform and the CellSearch system in esophageal carcinoma [25]. The high sensitivity of this size-based platform could be mainly attributed to two factors: Firstly, the CellSearch system only regarded tumor cells with epithelial phenotype in peripheral blood as CTCs, which did not take other properties and processes which were associated with malignant potential into consideration, such as EMT, cohesive and collective cell migration [22]. Secondly, this size-based platform captured malignant cells by the difference of diameter and deformability between abnormal cells and haemocytes, hence it could isolate more abnormal cells for further identifying CTCs. However, when comparing the CTC detection rates by ISET (isolation by size of epithelial tumor cells) in some studies [26‐29], there was a subtle difference in this study. The discrepancy might due to the heterogeneity of different cancers, different stages of tumor, and whether undergoing treatment or not, etc.

We also observed the relationship between CTCs and clinicopathological characteristics, as shown in Table 1. It was found that CTCs were associated with tumor de-differentiation, lymphatic invasion, TNM stage, and serum CEA level, which were consistent with the results of previous studies [30, 31]. In addition, serum CEA values in CTCs-positive patients were higher than CTCs-negative patients, which indicated that patients with high CEA levels had more opportunities to be CTCs-positive. Moreover, CTC count was increasing with decreasing tumor de-differentiation, increasing lymphatic invasion, TNM stage, and serum CEA level. Therefore, although the decisions on stage of disease still did not include the results of CTC assessment, the presence of CTCs might be an adjunct to staging [32], and it could be expected that CTC detection predicted the properties and processes of the disease (e.g. lymphatic invasion, TNM stage, and serum CEA level).

This study found that the presence of CTCs was associated with decreased survival in advanced CRC patients with 2–6 cycles chemotherapy, and Cox regression analyses showed that CTC detection was an independent prognostic factor for survival, which was consistent with previous studies [23, 24, 33, 34]. Notably, it was reported that the relationship between CTC detection and prognosis was more significant and convincing when the blood samples were collected during treatment than at baseline [23, 24], which indicated that sample collection during treatment was preferable for CTC detection to predict CRC patient’s outcomes. That was the reason why we recruited the advanced CRC patients with 2–6 cycles chemotherapy in this study. Moreover, CTM was captured by this size-based platform, and CTM-positive patients with advanced CRC had worse survival than isolated CTCs-positive patients. It was reported that tumor cells within CTM could be protected from anoikis and were relatively resistant to cytotoxic drugs [35], and CTM was an independent prognostic factor [35, 36]. Hence, CTM would be more malignant and aggressive than isolated CTCs.

CTCs were comprised of heterogeneous cells including epithelial tumor cells, tumor cells undergoing EMT and tumor stem cells etc. [12, 37, 38], and circulating epithelial tumor cells had been shown to respond to therapy in the same way as the primary tumor [39], while the detection of EMT markers (LOXL3 and ZEB2) for CTCs in mCRC predicted poor survival and therapy response during treatment [40], hence CTC molecular characterization could offer the potential to better understand the biology of metastasis and resistance to established therapies [19]. In this study CTC phenotype was measured by immunofluorescent staining for CK8/18/19 (epithelial marker) and vimentin (mesenchymal marker), and it was found that all CTM were vimentin-positive, while most of the isolated CTCs were CK-positive. Moreover, patients with vimentin+ CTCs had worse survival than CK+ CTCs. To our knowledge, this was the first study that evaluated the prognostic role of CTCs with epithelial and mesenchymal phenotype in advanced CRC patients during treatment.

In this study, it was found that the presence of CTCs was associated with decreased survival, and was an independent prognostic factor for outcome in advanced CRC patients during chemotherapy. Moreover, patients with CTM had shorter survival than those with isolated CTCs, and patients with vimentin+ CTCs had worse survival compared to those with CK+ CTCs. Therefore, this study had demonstrated that CTM and vimentin+ CTCs could be used to improve prognostic value of CTCs in advanced CRC patients under treatment.