Breast cancer circulating tumor cells with mesenchymal features—an unreachable target?

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) mediate dissemination of solid tumors and can be an early sign of disease progression. Moreover, they show a great potential in terms of non-invasive, longitudinal monitoring of cancer patients. CTCs have been extensively studied in breast cancer (BC) and were shown to present a significant phenotypic plasticity connected with initiation of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). Apart from conferring malignant properties, EMT affects CTCs recovery rate, making a significant portion of CTCs from patients’ samples undetected. Wider application of methods and markers designed to isolate and identify mesenchymal CTCs is required to expand our knowledge about the clinical impact of mesenchymal CTCs. Therefore, here we provide a comprehensive review of clinical significance of mesenchymal CTCs in BC together with statistical analysis of previously published data, in which we assessed the suitability of a number of methods/markers used for isolation of CTCs with different EMT phenotypes, both in in vitro spike-in tests with BC cell lines, as well as clinical samples. Results of spiked-in cell lines indicate that, in general, methods not based on epithelial enrichment only, capture mesenchymal CTCs much more efficiently that CellSearch(®) (golden standard in CTCs detection), but at the same time are not much inferior to Cell Search(®), though large variation in recovery rates of added cells among the methods is observed. In clinical samples, where additional CTCs detection markers are needed, positive epithelial-based CTCs enrichment was the most efficient in isolating CTCs with mesenchymal features from non-metastatic BC patients. From the marker side, PI3K and VIM were contributing the most to detection of CTCs with mesenchymal features (in comparison to SNAIL) in non-metastatic and metastatic BC patients, respectively. However, additional data are needed for more robust identification of markers for efficient detection of CTCs with mesenchymal features. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00018-021-04064-6.