ArticleEcancermedicalscience2013
Heterogeneity of circulating epithelial tumour cells from individual patients with respect to expression profiles and clonal growth (sphere formation) in breast cancer.
Article in Ecancermedicalscience, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Standard deviation of CT radiomic features among malignancies in each individual: prognostic ability in lung cancer patients.Journal of cancer research and clinical oncology · 2023Trial
- Increased Circulating Epithelial Tumor Cells (CETC/CTC) over the Course of Adjuvant Radiotherapy Is a Predictor of Less Favorable Outcome in Patients with Early-Stage Breast Cancer.Current oncology (Toronto, Ont.) · 2022Trial
- Reconstructing the metastatic journey: functional circulating tumor cells and disseminated tumor cells based models for translational oncology.Journal of experimental & clinical cancer research : CR · 2026Review
- Circulating Epithelial Tumor Cells (CETC/CTC) in Prostate Cancer: Potential Prognostic Marker for the Risk of Recurrence During Radiotherapy.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Patient-derived xenografts from circulating cancer stem cells as a preclinical model for personalized pancreatic cancer research.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Isolating Circulating Cancer Stem Cells (CCSCs) from Human Whole Blood.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2024Article
- Cell Lines of Circulating Tumor Cells: What Is Known and What Needs to Be Resolved.Journal of personalized medicine · 2022Review
- Article
- Prospective Monitoring of Circulating Epithelial Tumor Cells (CETC) Reveals Changes in Gene Expression during Adjuvant Radiotherapy of Breast Cancer Patients.Current oncology (Toronto, Ont.) · 2021Article
- Ex Vivo Expansion and Drug Sensitivity Profiling of Circulating Tumor Cells from Patients with Small Cell Lung Cancer.Cancers · 2020Article
- Heterogeneity of Circulating Tumor Cells in Breast Cancer: Identifying Metastatic Seeds.International journal of molecular sciences · 2020Review
- Article
- Circulating Tumor Cells: Fluid Surrogates of Solid Tumors.Annual review of pathology · 2017Review
- Evaluation and consequences of heterogeneity in the circulating tumor cell compartment.Oncotarget · 2016Review
- Evaluating blood levels of neuron specific enolase, chromogranin A, and circulating tumor cells as Merkel cell carcinoma biomarkers.Oncotarget · 2015Article
- Short-term expansion of breast circulating cancer cells predicts response to anti-cancer therapy.Oncotarget · 2015Article
- Methods for detecting circulating cancer stem cells (CCSCs) as a novel approach for diagnosis of colon cancer relapse/metastasis.Laboratory investigation; a journal of technical methods and pathology · 2015Article
- Epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition in breast cancer: a role for insulin-like growth factor I and insulin-like growth factor-binding protein 3?Breast cancer (Dove Medical Press) · 2015Review
- Endothelin-1/endothelin A receptor-mediated biased signaling is a new player in modulating human ovarian cancer cell tumorigenesis.Cellular signalling · 2014Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThe detection of tumour cells circulating in the peripheral blood of patients with breast cancer is a sign that cells have been able to leave the primary tumour and survive in the circulation. However, in order to form metastases, they require additional properties such as the ability to adhere, self-renew, and grow. Here we present data that a variable fraction among the circulating tumour cells detected by the Maintrac(®) approach expresses mRNA of the stem cell gene NANOG and of the adhesion molecule vimentin and is capable of forming tumour spheres, a property ascribed to tumour-initiating cells (TICs). PATIENTS AND
methodsBetween ten and 50 circulating epithelial antigen-positive cells detected by the Maintrac approach were selected randomly from each of 20 patients with breast cancer before and after surgery and were isolated using automated capillary aspiration and deposited individually onto slides for expression profiling. In addition, the circulating tumour cells were cultured without isolation among the white blood cells from 39 patients with breast cancer in different stages of disease using culture methods favouring growth of epithelial cells.
resultsAlthough no epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM)-positive cells expressing stem cell genes or the adhesion molecule vimentin was detected before surgery, 10%-20% of the cells were found to be positive for mRNA of these genes after surgery. Tumour spheres from circulating cells of 39 patients with different stages of breast cancer were grown without previous isolation in a fraction increasing with the aggressivity of the tumour. SUMMARY: Here we show that among the peripherally circulating tumour cells, a variable fraction is able to express stem cell and adhesion properties and can be grown into tumour spheres, a property ascribed to cells capable of initiating tumours and metastases.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.