Better together: circulating tumor cell clustering in metastatic cancer

Emma Schuster, Rokana Taftaf, Carolina Reduzzi, Mary K. Albert, Isabel Romero-Calvo, Huiping Liu*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

122 Scopus citations

Abstract

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are vital components of liquid biopsies for diagnosis of residual cancer, monitoring of therapy response, and prognosis of recurrence. Scientific dogma focuses on metastasis mediated by single CTCs, but advancement of CTC detection technologies has elucidated multicellular CTC clusters, which are associated with unfavorable clinical outcomes and a 20- to 100-fold greater metastatic potential than single CTCs. While the mechanistic understanding of CTC cluster formation is still in its infancy, multiple cell adhesion molecules and tight junction proteins have been identified that underlie the outperforming attributes of homotypic and heterotypic CTC clusters, such as cell survival, cancer stemness, and immune evasion. Future directions include high-resolution characterization of CTCs at multiomic levels for diagnostic/prognostic evaluations and targeted therapies.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1020-1032
Number of pages13
JournalTrends in Cancer
Volume7
Issue number11
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 2021

Funding

This review was partially supported by US Department of Defense grant W81XWH-20-1-0679 (H.L.), National Institutes of Health grants R01CA245699 (H.L.) and T32GM008061 (E.S.), the Northwestern University Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center Lynn Sage Foundation , the H Foundation (H.L.), and a Northwestern University Department of Pharmacology Julius Kahn Memorial Fellowship (R.T.). Figures 1 and 3 were created with BioRender.com .

Keywords

  • CTC clusters
  • breast cancer
  • circulating tumor cells (CTCs)
  • liquid biopsy

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Oncology
  • Cancer Research

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