Evaluation of Human Mammaglobin as a Biomarker of Circulating Tumor Cells in Breast Cancer and Clinical Verification

Abstract Cytokeratin (CK) is the gold standard marker for the differential diagnosis of epithelial circulating tumor cells (CTC), but the low expression of CK can lead to false negative results.In this study, the specificity and sensitivity of human breast globin (hMAM) as a tumor marker of CTC in peripheral blood of breast cancer patients were analyzed and aim to improve the CTC detection accuracy in breast cancer, enrich the candidate markers for clinical differential diagnosis of breast cancer CTC. EpCAM antibody modified liposome magnetic particles (ELMP) were prepared, and then their physicochemical properties were characterized. ELMP has high physicochemical stability and can efficiently enrich the CTC of epithelial breast cancer. We found hMAM is more consistent with clinical and pathological diagnosis results. To be noted, CK19 combined with hMAM method efficiently distinguish the separated CTC from breast cancer patients, furthermore, the specificity and sensitivity of CTC detection get promoted.