High-Efficiency Isolation and Rapid Identification of Heterogeneous Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) Using Dual-Antibody-Modified Fluorescent-Magnetic Nanoparticles

Extreme rarity and inherent heterogeneity of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) result in a tremendous challenge for the CTC isolation from patient blood samples with high efficiency and purity. Current CTC isolation approaches mainly rely on the epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM), which may significantly reduce the ability to capture CTCs when the expression of EpCAM is lost or down-regulated in epithelial–mesenchymal transition. Here, a rapid and highly efficient method is developed to isolate and identify heterogeneous CTCs with high efficiency from patient blood samples using the fluorescent-magnetic nanoparticles (F-MNPs). A dual-antibody interface targeting EpCAM and N-cadherin is fabricated onto the F-MNPs to capture epithelial CTCs as well as mesenchymal CTCs from whole blood samples. The poly(carboxybetaine methacrylate) brushes of excellent antifouling properties are employed to decrease nonspecific cell adhesion. Moreover, the F-MNPs provide a prompt identification strategy for heterogeneous CTCs (F-MNPs+, Hoechst 33342+, and CD45−) that can directly identify CTCs in a gentle one-step processing within 1 h after isolation from patient blood samples. This has been demonstrated through artificial samples as well as patient samples in details.