A PRE-CLINICAL METHOD FOR MONITORING SERIAL CHANGES IN CIRCULATING BREAST CANCER CELLS IN MICE

摘要

The CellTracks® System provides a system to enumerate CTCs in blood. Thesystem immunomagnetically concentratesepithelial cells, fluorescently labels the cells and identifies and quantifiesCTCs. The absolute number of CTCs detected inthe peripheral blood tumor load is, in part, a factor in prediction ofsurvival, time to progression, and response to therapy.Pre-clinical studies of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have been limited bythe inability to repetitively monitor CTCs in animalmodels. The present invention provides a method to enumerate CTCs in bloodsamples obtained from living mice, using a protocolsimilar to an in vitro diagnostic system for quantifying CTCs in patients.Accordingly, this technology can be adapted for serialmonitoring of CTCs in mouse xenograft tumor models of human breast cancer.