Resumen
Metastasis is the primary cause of cancer-related deaths, but is poorly understood. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) seed distant sites are a promising model system for studying metastasis. Unfortunately, CTCs are very rare and there are few methods for efficiently establishing in vitro and in vivo CTC models. We extended our recently published method for routinely establishing CTC cultures from liquid biopsies (blood draws) of breast cancer patients to diverse cancers, i.e., colon, lung, and pancreatic. We also successfully established CTC-derived xenograft (CDX) models from the expanded CTCs. We used these models to identify genomic markers and pathways associated with metastases.