Short-Term Circulating Tumor Cell Dynamics in Mouse Xenograft Models and Implications for Liquid Biopsy

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are widely studied using liquid biopsy methods that analyze fractionally-small peripheral blood (PB) samples. However, little is known about natural fluctuations in CTC numbers that may occur over short timescales in vivo, and how these may affect detection and enumeration of rare CTCs from small blood samples.We recently developed an optical instrument called "diffuse in vivo flow cytometry" (DiFC) that uniquely...