Table 1.
Patients characteristics at baseline.
Figure 1.
Recovery efficiency of known numbers of spiked A-431 cells from 7.5 mL of blood.
The number of spiked cells is plotted against cells recovered by the CellSearch. The Pearson correlation value (R2) indicates strong correlation between spiked and recovered cells.
Table 2.
CTCs prevalence in recurrent/metastatic head and neck cancer patients.
Table 3.
Univariate associations between CTCs at baseline and clinico-pathologic characteristics.
Figure 2.
Kaplan-Meier curves of (A) progression-free survival and (B) overall survival in patients with 0, 1 and ≥2 CTCs.
Figure 3.
Kaplan-Meier estimates of overall survival according to a combined risk factors model with Argiris factors and CTCs.
Continuous line indicates absence of both risk factors; small dotted line indicates the presence of only one of the two risk factors; large dotted line indicates the presence of both risk factors.
Table 4.
Multivariate analysis of progression-free and overall survival.
Figure 4.
Association between the presence of CTCs before starting a new line of chemotherapy and response to treatment.
Higher response rate is observed in CTC-negative patients at baseline (A). Dynamic variation of CTCs numbers before and after treatment in patients (n = 10) with at least two determinations and at least one CTC at any time point. CTCs changes did not correlate with tumor response (B).
Figure 5.
Example of CTCs analysis in a patient with mediastinal and axillary nodal metastases from an oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma.
(A) the CellSearch output of baseline CTC analysis showing two CTCs with heterogeneous EGFR expression. (B) Timeline of CTC analysis and treatments. (C) Correlative imaging analysis by CT/PET at baseline and after chemotherapy. In this patient 3 CTCs were detected at baseline. After 4 cycles of a chemotherapy, CTC number rised to 9 suggesting progressive disease then confirmed by CT/PET imaging.