Pre-clinical method for monitoring serial changes in circulating breast cancer cells in mice

摘要

The CellTracks® System provides a system to enumerate CTC's in blood. The system immunomagnetically concentrates epithelial cells, fluorescently labels the cells and identifies and quantifies CTC's. The absolute number of CTC's detected in the peripheral blood tumor load is, in part, a factor in prediction of survival, time to progression, and response to therapy. Pre-clinical studies of circulating tumor cells (CTC's) have been limited by the inability to repetitively monitor CTC's in animal models. The present invention provides a method to enumerate CTC's in blood samples obtained from living mice, using a protocol similar to an in vitro diagnostic system for quantifying CTC's in patients. Accordingly, this technology can be adapted for serial monitoring of CTC's in mouse xenograft tumor models of human breast cancer.