An independent study has found that tumour cells circulating in the blood of patients with the most aggressive form of brain cancer can be captured and analysed using technology made by CelLBxHealth PLC (AIM:CLBX, FRA:DWV), the liquid biopsy company.
Glioblastoma rarely spreads beyond the brain, which had made blood-based detection of the disease an unlikely prospect.
The study, published in the journal JCO Precision Oncology, used the company's Parsortix platform to isolate circulating tumour cells (CTCs) from blood samples taken from 27 patients with glioblastoma.
Researchers at Fondazione Pisana per la Scienza and Ospedali Riuniti di Livorno in Italy compared the results against healthy volunteers and patients with other brain lesions.
They proposed a threshold of more than four CTCs per 5ml of blood to distinguish glioblastoma patients from healthy controls.
That measure produced 80% sensitivity, meaning the proportion of cancer patients correctly identified, and 77.3% specificity, the proportion of healthy people correctly ruled out.
The captured cells carried tumour-related mutations and chromosomal changes also present in matched tissue samples, indicating that the blood-borne cells reflected the underlying tumour biology.
No CTCs were detected in samples from patients with radionecrosis, a form of tissue damage caused by radiotherapy, or lymphoma.
That finding suggests the technique could help distinguish a returning tumour from the effects of treatment, a distinction that scans often struggle to make.
Lavanya Sivapalan, chief scientific officer, said repeat tissue sampling in glioblastoma required invasive neurosurgery, leaving clinicians reliant on imaging that can be difficult to interpret.
She said the proposed threshold and the genomic overlap with tumour tissue supported further investigation of CTCs as a complementary approach in a cancer that is difficult to sample.
The findings align with the company's own glioblastoma research, presented at the Society for Neuro-Oncology annual meeting in Hawaii in November.
