Harvest of Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) From Patients With Metastatic Breast Cancer (MBC) Using the Parsortix™ PC1 System

Approximately 200 evaluable MBC patients (either newly diagnosed or patients with progressive/recurrent disease who are about to start a new line of therapy for the treatment of their disease) and 200 evaluable healthy volunteer (HV) subjects (healthy women with no history of cancer) will be enrolled at a minimum of three (3) US based clinical sites. Each subject will have information about their age race/ethnicity, height and weight, menopausal status, smoking status, pregnancy and/or nursing status, and a brief medical history captured at the time of enrollment. Blood will be drawn from each subject into three different EDTA tubes (minimum of ~7mL up to a maximum of ~23mL of whole blood) specifically for the purposes of this study. One of the blood tubes collected will be used for a complete blood count (CBC) with differential testing, while the other two tubes of blood will be processed on the Parsortix PC1 system for the capture and harvest of CTCs. The cells harvested from one of the blood tubes will be deposited onto a glass slide and automated Wright-Giemsa staining will be done to allow for identification of CTCs based on their cytologic features (e.g. size, shape, nuclear to cytoplasmic ratio, chromatin structure, etc.) by an expert cytopathologist. The cells harvested from the remaining blood tube will be used for one of three different evaluations: Fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH) for evaluation of Her-2/neu gene amplification, quantitative reverse-transcriptase real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) for evaluation of cancer related gene expression, or whole transcriptome sequencing (RNAseq) for determination of the expression patterns of breast cancer related genes.