A molecular beacon detects CLDN18.2 for precision medicine in gastric cancer

Purpose

CLDN18.2 has emerged as a promising therapeutic target for gastric cancer (GC). However, conventional CLDN18.2 diagnosis based on immunohistochemistry (IHC) has limits due to its dependency of biopsy sample and biases from experiments and pathologists. To address this, we propose using a molecular beacon (MB) to detect CLDN18.2 RNA of circulating tumor cells (CTCs), which can be applied in clinical practice as a supplementary diagnostic method.

Methods

We constructed an easily prepared and cost-effective DNA MB to detect CLDN18.2 RNA. Afterwards, we verified the function of semi quantification of CLDN18.2 RNA by fluorescence signal of the MB. We then evaluated CLDN18.2 RNA levels in the CTCs of three patients, which was compared with tissue expression using IHC.

Results

Our results show that this technique has excellent sensitivity and specificity, making it suitable for application in platforms with CTCs. We found consistent results between CLDN18.2 RNA from CTCs and tissue expression levels in three patients. This demonstrates the potential of the CLDN18.2 MB method in accurately detecting CLDN18.2 in clinical practice.

Conclusions

The CLDN18.2 MB holds significant promise for various clinical applications in patients with GC, including complementary diagnostics, drug adaptability testing, and disease progression evaluation.