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Cancerous tumors are formidable enemies, recruiting blood vessels to aid their voracious growth, damaging nearby tissues, and deploying numerous strategies to evade the body's defense systems. But even more malicious are the circulating tumor cells (CTCs) that tumors release, which travel stealthily through the bloodstream and take up residence in other parts of the body, a process known as metastasis. While dangerous, their presence is also a valuable indicator of the stage of a patient's disease, making CTCs an attractive new approach to cancer diagnostics. Unfortunately, finding the relative handful of CTCs among the trillions of healthy blood cells in the human body is like playing the ultimate game of needle-in-a-haystack: CTCs can make up as few as one in ten thousand of the cells in the blood of a cancer patient. This is made even more difficult by the lack of broad-spectrum CTC capture agents, as the most commonly used antibodies fail to recognize many types of cancer cells.

See original article at: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170628131419.htm