Greatly isolated heterogeneous circulating tumor cells using hybrid engineered cell membrane-camouflaged magnetic nanoparticles

Abstract Background Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are considered as a useful biomarker for early cancer diagnosis, which play a crucial role in metastatic process. Unfortunately, the tumor heterogeneity and extremely rare occurrence rate of CTCs among billions of interfering leukocytes seriously hamper the sensitivity and purity of CTCs isolation. Methods To address these, we firstly used microfluidic chips to detect the broad-spectrum of triple target combination biomarkers in CTCs of 10 types of cancer patients, including EpCAM, EGFR and Her2. Then, we constructed hybrid engineered cell membrane-camouflaged magnetic nanoparticles (HE-CM-MNs) for efficient capture of heterogeneous CTCs with high-purity, which was enabled by inheriting the recognition ability of HE-CM for various CTCs and reducing homologous cell interaction with leukocytes. Compared with single E-CM-MNs, HE-CM-MNs showed a significant improvement in the capture efficiency for a cell mixture, with an efficiency of 90%. And the capture efficiency of HE-CM-MNs toward 12 subpopulations of tumor cells was ranged from 70 to 85%. Furthermore, by using HE-CM-MNs, we successfully isolated heterogeneous CTCs with high purity from clinical blood samples. Finally, the captured CTCs by HE-CM-MNs could be used for gene mutation analysis. Conclusions This study demonstrated the promising potential of HE-CM-MNs for heterogeneous CTCs detection and downstream analysis. Graphical abstract