Novel method for the detection and evaluation of disease biomarkers on white blood cells from liquid biopsies
The RareCyte platform was built to find rare circulating tumor cells; this AACR 2023 poster from RareCyte and Eli Lilly reuses the same stained slide to quantify monocyte and granulocyte subpopulations, to detect spiked tumor cells alongside them, and to measure an undisclosed drug-target biomarker across all three populations.
Presented by RareCyte.
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- A platform built to find rare tumor cells was turned on the abundant cells around them. AccuCyte, an unbiased density-based method, moves nucleated cells from whole blood onto a slide stained for CD14, CD66b, CK/EpCAM, Sytox and the biomarker; new scanning and analysis algorithms then quantify monocyte and granulocyte subpopulations alongside rare tumor cells, from among the millions of cells each slide carries, with imaging on CyteFinder.
- Monocyte and granulocyte percentages tracked the standard CBC from the same donors. Across three donors the assay read monocytes at 8.4%, 6.4% and 6.7% where CBC read 8.3%, 7.4% and 7.1%, and granulocytes at 63.5%, 72.0% and 51.3% where CBC read 65.6%, 73.3% and 57.7%. CBCs were measured from EDTA tubes and the assay from AccuCyte tubes; the widest gap is the granulocyte reading in the third donor, and the poster reports no correlation statistic.
- An undisclosed drug-target biomarker read higher on monocytes than on granulocytes. Mean fluorescence intensity was aggregated from three replicate slides, with whiskers spanning the 5th to 95th percentile. The same ranking held in a second run of two replicate slides that added BT474 breast-cancer-derived cells spiked into whole blood, where the biomarker sat lowest on those tumor cells; the poster names neither the biomarker nor a statistical test for the difference.
