The University of Colorado Denver's Department of Pathology at the Anschutz Medical Campus has recently acquired a technology for tracking Circulating Tumor Cells (CTC) in patients with metastatic breast, colorectal and prostate cancer. The technology is called CellSearch TM, by Veridex LLC.

What are CTC's? Basically, they are cancer cells that have broken away from a solid tumor in the body and are traveling freely through the blood stream. Invariably, these little travelers can spread throughout the body and reattach themselves to form metastasis or secondary cancers. The number of CTC's that a patient has in their bloodstream can be useful information to doctors in making care plan decisions, as well as, estimating progression free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS).

Dr. Ann Thor, Chair of Pathology at the University of Colorado, states; "We are excited to acquire this cutting edge technology, and feel that it will be a very useful patient care plan decision tool for our regional medical colleagues...with nearly 95,000 U.S. deaths estimated for 2008 (combined statistics for breast, colorectal and prostate cancers), we need every tool we can get to make good treatment decisions..."

Testing for CTC's is typically done at baseline before starting any new line of cancer treatment for metastatic disease, and then again at physician delineated time points after each treatment. Testing is simple, requiring little more than a blood draw, and results are reported quickly, within 5 days. CTC monitoring is intended to offer doctors a faster insight to a specific treatment's effectiveness, as compared to more traditional radiographic tests that are usually performed at 12 week intervals. This advantage can be crucial in deciding the efficacy of a treatment, and therefore making the decision to continue or change treatment types.

More information about CTC at the University of Colorado may be obtained by emailing: