Isolation and characterization of CTCs from patients with cancer of a urothelial origin

Monitoring of circulating tumor cells’ (CTCs) presence has the potential to improve therapeutic management of oncological diseases at an early stage and also to identify patients with increased risk of tumor progression or recurrence before the onset of clinically detected metastasis. Here we describe a new simplified efficient methodology for the separation and in vitro culturing of viable CTCs from peripheral blood by size-based filtration (MetaCell®). The isolation protocol yields preferentially cells bigger than 8 μm enabling further cytomorphological and molecular analysis.