Mehmet Toner, of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, will discuss several microfluid methods to improve the sensitivity of rare-event circulating tumor cell (CTC) isolation. Viable tumor-derived CTCs have been identified in peripheral blood from cancer patients and are not only the origin of intractable metastatic disease, but also markers for early cancer. The ability to isolate CTCs has proven to be difficult. Several microfluidic measures are particularly attractive because they can lead to efficient purification of viable CTCs from unprocessed whole blood.
A pre-talk reception will take place about 20 minutes before the talk.