Herein, we performed a meta-analysis including 12 published studies with 1,802 patients identified from PubMed and EBSCO to assess the prognostic impact of podoplanin-positive CAFs in lung cancer patients.
We evaluated the prognostic impact of podoplanin expression in patients with pathological stage (p-stage) IA lung adenocarcinoma as categorised by the 8th edition of the tumour-node-metastasis classification for lung cancer.
In the present study, we showed that EpCAM-negative tumor cells as well as EpCAM-positive cells were captured with the novel 'universal CTC-chip' as follows: i) human lung cancer cells (PC-9), with strong EpCAM expression, were efficiently captured with the CTC-chip coated with an anti-EpCAM antibody (with an average capture efficiency of 101% when tumor cells were spiked in phosphate‑buffered saline (PBS) and 88% when spiked in blood); ii) human mesothelioma cells (ACC-MESO-4), with no EpCAM expression but with podoplanin expression, were captured with the CTC-chip coated with an anti-podoplanin antibody (average capture efficiency of 78% when tumor cells were spiked in PBS and 38% when spiked in blood), whereas ACC-MESO-4 cells were not captured with the CTC-chip coated with the anti-EpCAM antibody.