Fluxion Biosciences, Inc. has launched two new kits for enhanced circulating tumour cell (CTC) isolation and recovery that are designed to work exclusively with the IsoFlux Liquid Biopsy system. The new kits include the Enhanced Recovery Kit and the EMT Kit. The Enhanced Recovery kit adds EGFR to the traditional EpCAM antibody, and the EMT kit includes EpCAM, EGFR, and two proprietary mesenchymal phenotype antibodies.

Circulating tumour cells (CTCs) disseminate from primary tumours and enter the peripheral bloodstream. Ongoing access to cancer tissue represents one of the most significant challenges in characterizing cancer, and CTCs can alleviate this limitation by providing frequent, minimally-invasive access to cancer tissue via a blood draw. The IsoFlux System uses blood to perform a real-time “liquid biopsy” of the patient’s cancer using the recovered CTCs. The high efficiency and high purity of the recovered cells allows for the use of highly multiplexed analyses such as next-generation sequencing (NGS) for cancer mutational profiling. Screening for a broad range of cancer biomarkers via NGS will help guide treatment decisions using an emerging class of precision cancer therapies. The introduction of the new CTC kits increases the recovery efficiency of CTCs, further improving the IsoFlux system’s industry-leading sensitivity.

According to Fluxion’s CTO, Dr. Cristian Ionescu-Zanetti, the new kits provide significant gains in cell recovery and open new avenues in clinical research. “It is well known that EpCAM expression levels vary greatly across cancer types and within cancer cell populations.  This can limit the recovery efficiency in very low-expressing cancer types, such as lung and pancreatic cancers. Although the IsoFlux system’s high-sensitivity microfluidic cell recovery performs well on these low expressers when targeting EpCAM, the new kits provide a higher level of performance while enabling recovery of a wider spectrum of cell types. The EMT kit is the first commercially available that targets the mesenchymal cell phenotype for CTCs that have undergone EMT, considered to be a potential contributor to metastasis.”

The Enhanced Recovery Kit (PN 910-0108) and EMT Kit (PN 910-0106) are available immediately and the kits can be used on all existing IsoFlux systems without modification.