Development of a protocol for isolation and gene expression analysis in single circulating tumour cells

Circulating tumour cells (CTCs) are malignant tumour cells which detached from the primary tumour and circulate in peripheral blood (Thiery, Acloque, Huang, & Nieto, 2009). Recent discoveries show that classical epithelial CTCs can undergo epithelial-mesenchymal transition, which changes their phenotype to mesenchymal (Cichon, Nelson, & Radisky, 2015; Thiery et al., 2009). Mesenchymal CTCs can acquire additional malignant properties. Due to their rarity and heterogeneity CTCs can be best characterized on the level of single cell (Micalizzi, Haber, & Maheswaran, 2017; Palmirotta et al., 2017).