Identification of target structures and therapy prediction

Tumor cells display high heterogeneity in their genetic and phenotypic characteristics. Depending on the individual cancer, different enrichment and detection methods thus have to be applied to enable detection of the rare circulating and disseminated tumor cells (CTCs and DTCs). With some tumors, expression analysis of characteristic marker proteins (e.g. cytokeratins in breast or prostate cancer) is an option, while in other cases the cells can be detected via physical properties such as size or deformability, which differs between tumor cells and normal cells in blood or other organs. Detection of the cells alone, however, does not yet provide clues to appropriate therapeutic intervention. Besides isolation of pure cell populations down to a single tumor cell, this requires sensitive and reliable molecular analyses. One of our core competencies in this context is the analysis of expressed genes and genomic DNA of the same cell in parallel.