Original paper
Detection of circulating carcinoma cells in peripheral blood collected from patients with ovarian cancer by using different molecular markers – a preliminary report

Introduction:
Efficient techniques enabling the ovarian cancer patients’ diagnosis, prognosis and therapy remain far from perfection. Especially, the prognostic significance of circulating tumour cells’ (CTC) presence remains to some extent unclear. Latest findings on this matter suggest a need to revise the modern persuasion about the meaning of single tumour cell detection in peripheral blood (PB) or bone marrow (BM) by using standard cancer diagnostic procedures, as standard histopathological, immunohisto- and immunocytochemical procedures. However, that negative state induced the investigation of mRNA transcripts present in tumour diseases, which could be easily detected by using real-time RT-PCR method. The RNA markers used in this study were: cytokeratin 19 (CK19), telomerase catalytic subunit (hTERT) and two markers thought to be tissue-specific for ovaries: steroidogenic acute regulatory protein (StAR) and creatine kinase B (CKB).
Materials and methods:
The blood samples from 20 women were collected in two parts (blood from each 10-person group was used either to perform real-time RT-PCR, or TA PCR-ELISA [enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay]).
Results:
Both real-time RT-PCR and TA PCR-ELISA methods showed some degree of specificity in this study, but not enough to be put in practice.
Conclusions:
Both results of our study and the small number of articles on molecular markers suitable for detecting CTCs in PB of patients with OC show that this aim will be hard to achieve by using standard molecular biology tools, like PCR or even real-time PCR. However, these attempts should not be terminated, because if any of them succeeds, the diagnostic value of this technique will be great.