Abstract

This mini review provides a short overview of the main methods of the selection and analysis of the circulating tumor cells. We briefly focus on the evolution of the technical approaches used in the CTCs analysis from early description of the most discussed contemporary workflows such as Cellsearch and CTC-iChip. In addition, we discuss more “unconventional” approaches such as mass spectrometry and NMR based methods of CTC analysis.

Keywords: Circulating tumor cells, CTC cluster, breast cancer, prostate cancer, detection of CTCs, Cellsearch.