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 language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1020-1032 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Trends in Cancer |
Volume | 7 |
Issue number | 11 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 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