ANGLE has published new research by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) suggesting the spread of breast cancer accelerates during sleep.
The study utilised ANGLE’s Parsortix system to investigate the impact of sleep on the release of circulating tumour cells (CTCs) in preclinical models and 30 patients with breast cancer (21 with early stage and 9 with metastatic disease).
Nicola Aceto, a professor at ETH Zurich, said: ”In this study we observed a striking and unexpected pattern of CTC generation dynamics in both patients with breast cancer and preclinical models, highlighting that most spontaneous CTC intravasation events occur during sleep.
“Further, we demonstrate that rest-phase CTCs are highly prone to metastasize, whereas CTCs generated during the active phase are devoid of metastatic ability.
“These findings suggest the need for time-controlled approaches for the characterisation and treatment of breast cancer and the investigation of new drug targets."
Aceto added that the use of Parsortix had enabled ETH reliably to harvest CTCs, CTC clusters and CTC-white blood cell (WBC) clusters and to develop an understanding of cancer metastasis not previously possible.
The research has been published as a peer-reviewed publication in Nature and is available online at https://angleplc.com/library/publications/.