Wei Guo, Yun-Fan Sun, Min-Na Shen, Xiao-Lu Ma, Jiong Wu, Chun-Yan Zhang, Yan Zhou, Yang Xu, Bo Hu, Min Zhang, Gang Wang, Wei-Qin Chen, Lin Guo, Ren-Quan Lu, Chao-Hui Zhou, Xin Zhang, Ying-Hong Shi, Shuang-Jian Qiu, Bai-Shen Pan, Ya Cao, Jian Zhou, Xin-Rong Yang, Jia Fan
Background: In the present study, we assessed the clinical value of circulating tumor cells (CTC) with stem-like phenotypes for diagnosis, prognosis, and surveillance in hepatitis B virus (HBV)-related hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) by an optimized qPCR-based detection platform. Methods: Differing subsets of CTCs were investigated, and a multimarker diagnostic CTC panel was constructed in a multicenter patient study with independent validation (total n = 1,006), including healthy individuals and patients with chronic hepatitis B infection (CHB), liver cirrhosis (LC), benign hepatic lesion (BHL), and HBV-related HCC, with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) reflecting diagnostic accuracy...
January 26, 2018: Clinical Cancer Research: An Official Journal of the American Association for Cancer Research