Menarini Silicon Biosystems CellMag product line for CTC capture

Menarini Silicon Biosystems has launched the CellMag product line for the manual enrichment and staining of rare circulating tumour cells (CTCs), whose presence in blood has been associated with poor prognosis in metastatic carcinomas. The easy-to-use technology offers researchers who work on translational projects a tool to study the heterogeneous biology of CTCs.

The product line, composed of the CellMag CTC Epithelial Cell kit, a magnetic tool and consumables, will allow liquid biopsy and CTCs laboratories to have access to a manual system using the same established ferrofluid technology offered by the CELLSEARCH system. Despite different available methods to capture CTCs, only the information that has been captured by CELLSEARCH has shown a robust clinical value in different settings.

Researchers can analyse and characterise enriched CTCs from a molecular perspective with a high level of specificity, gaining valuable insights into how certain tumours progress and disseminate throughout the body. The CellMag CTC Ephitelial Cell kit allows research centres, focusing on liquid biopsies, to conduct highly specific, established and standardised immunomagnetic enrichment and staining of CTCs in peripheral blood. Following the positive selection of enriched cells, performed by capturing cells through ferrofluids labelled with antibodies that target the EpCAM antigen, the staining procedure delivers cells that are ready for enumeration, isolation and downstream analysis. The final step of cell sorting can be performed by the DEPArray system or other downstream applications including flow cytometry, fluorescent microscopy, or molecular and phenotype analyses.

The product line allows liquid biopsy and CTCs laboratories to reach high specificity in cell enrichment and staining. It will soon be expanded to offer a series of additional kits for the enrichment of other rare cell types.