ArticleCommunications medicine2025
Gravity-based microfiltration reveals unexpected prevalence of circulating tumor cell clusters in ovarian and colorectal cancer.
Article in Communications medicine, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 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
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Applications of circulating tumor cells in esophageal cancer detection and treatment.Discover oncology · 2026Review
- Phenotypic and genotypic characterization of single circulating tumor cells in the follow-up of high-grade serous ovarian cancer.Molecular oncology · 2026Article
- Band-stop microfluidics for high-purity, label-free enrichment of viable cancer cells from whole blood.Lab on a chip · 2026Article
- Agent-based modelling reveals strategies to reduce the fitness and metastatic potential of circulating tumour cell clusters.Evolutionary applications · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
17 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundCirculating tumor cells (CTCs) are rare (a few cells per milliliter of blood) and mostly isolated as single-cell CTCs (scCTCs). CTC clusters (cCTCs), even rarer, are of growing interest, notably because of their higher metastatic potential, but very difficult to isolate.
methodWe introduce gravity-based microfiltration (GµF) for facile isolation of cCTCs using in-house fabricated microfilters and 3D printed cartridges. Optimal flow rate and pore size for cCTC isolation are determined by GµF of cultured ovarian single cells and cell clusters spiked in healthy blood. We perform GµF of blood from orthotopic ovarian cancer mouse models and characterize the morphological features of scCTCs and cCTCs, and the expression of molecular markers for aggressiveness. Finally, we analyze blood from 17 epithelial ovarian cancer patients with either localized or metastatic disease, and from 13 colorectal cancer liver metastasis patients.
resultsHere, we show that GµF optimized for cell cluster isolation captures cCTCs from blood while minimizing unwanted cluster disaggregation, with ~85% capture efficiency. We detect cCTCs in every patient, with between 2-100+ cells. We find cCTCs represent between 5-30% of all CTC capture events, and 10-80% of the CTCs are clustered; remarkably, in 10 patients, most CTCs are circulating not as scCTCs, but as cCTCs.
conclusionsGµF uncovers the unexpected prevalence and frequency of cCTCs including sometimes very large ones in epithelial ovarian cancer patients, and motivates additional studies to uncover their properties and role in disease progression.
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.