In Vitro Culture and Application of Circulating Tumor Cells

Circulating tumor cells are formed by cancer cells in the primary or metastatic foci spreading to circulatory system, which is of great value in the early diagnosis of tumor, metastasis and recurrence monitoring and evaluation of efficacy, especially the important target of metastasis intervention. In vitro culture of CTCs can provide a model for the screening of metastatic drugs and improve the accuracy of CTCs phenotypic analysis. However, CTCs are difficult to be cultured in vitro and become a bottleneck in the field of research. In the future, the primary task of this field is to identify the molecular characteristics of the CTCs subgroups (metastatic-CTC) that actually lead to metastasis, and then to build the intervention of drugs in vitro screening platform, thereby enhancing the efficacy of metastatic intervention. In this paper, the extraction of CTCs, culture methods, as well as in vitro research progress were reviewed in order to promote the progress of the field.