Microscale profiling of circulating tumor cells

Microscale analysis has facilitated significant progress towards the development of approaches that enable the capture of rare circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from the blood of cancer patients. This is a critical capability for noninvasive tumor profiling. These advances have allowed the capture and enumeration of CTCs with unique sensitivity. However, it has become clear that simply counting tumor cells cannot provide the information that could help to make significant clinical decisions. CTCs are heterogeneous and they can change as they enter the bloodstream. Therefore, profiling of CTCs at single cell level is critical to unraveling the complex and dynamic properties of these potential cancer markers.