Abstract

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) shed from primary and metastatic cancers are admixed with blood components and are thus rare, making their isolation and characterization a major technological challenge. CTCs hold the key to understanding the biology of metastasis and provide a biomarker to noninvasively measure the evolution of tumor genotypes during treatment and disease progression. Improvements in technologies to yield purer CTC populations amenable to better cellular and molecular characterization will enable a broad range of clinical applications, including early detection of disease and the discovery of biomarkers to predict treatment responses and disease progression.

Keywords

Circulating tumor cellBiologyBiomarkerMetastasisComputational biologyDiseaseIsolation (microbiology)Cancer researchBioinformaticsCancerPathologyGeneticsMedicine

Affiliated Institutions

Related Publications

Hallmarks of Cancer: New Dimensions

Douglas Hanahan

Abstract The hallmarks of cancer conceptualization is a heuristic tool for distilling the vast complexity of cancer phenotypes and genotypes into a provisional set of underlying...

2022 Cancer Discovery 7899 citations

Fibroblasts in cancer

Raghu Kalluri , Michael Zeisberg

Tumours are known as wounds that do not heal - this implies that cells that are involved in angiogenesis and the response to injury, such as endothelial cells and fibroblasts, h...

2006 Nature reviews. Cancer 4355 citations

Publication Info

Year
2011
Type
review
Volume
192
Issue
3
Pages
373-382
Citations
1091
Access
Closed

External Links

View on DOI.org

Social Impact

Altmetric
PlumX Metrics

Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions

Citation Metrics

1091
OpenAlex

Cite This

Min Yu, Shannon L. Stott, Mehmet Toner et al. (2011). Circulating tumor cells: approaches to isolation and characterization. The Journal of Cell Biology , 192 (3) , 373-382. https://doi.org/10.1083/jcb.201010021

Identifiers

DOI
10.1083/jcb.201010021