Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) provide an essential foundation for core cancer research and for reliably assessing the outcomes of medical treatments. Yet, recovering CTCs from patient blood samples remains technically demanding, with the main obstacles stemming from limitations in biomarker selectivity and the overall sensitivity of isolation procedures. In an earlier investigation, we introduced an innovative detection strategy for CTCs centered on a defining biophysical property of cancer cell surfaces: a negative electrical charge controlled by glycolytic metabolism. The present work reports experimental validation of this strategy’s performance in isolating CTCs from clinical blood specimens collected from patients diagnosed with solid tumors and leukemia. Results show that the technique can recover tens of thousands of living cancer cells from multiple metastatic solid tumors and leukemia cases using as little as 1 mL of blood. These isolated cells were counted via cytological imaging based on morphological traits typical of malignant cells. Our data confirm that the negatively charged surface is a consistent feature shared by both laboratory-cultured cancer cell lines and freshly obtained blood samples from individuals with cancer. Moreover, the nanomaterial-based capture platform used here outperformed earlier techniques, substantially improving the identification and preservation of CTCs for downstream confirmation and detailed study. These advances offer strong potential to refine cancer diagnostics and to better track patient responses to therapy.
