A Conversation with Daniel Haber
- Associate Editor, Cancer Discovery
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Daniel Haber is the Kurt J. Isselbacher Professor of Oncology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center.
Elizabeth McKenna:Can you briefly introduce the topic of circulating tumor cells (CTCs)?
Dr. Haber:Circulating tumor cells are cancer cells that are found in the blood. This is how cancer spreads from a primary tumor in an organ to give rise to metastases. These cells are rare, and they're surrounded by many blood cells. We've spent a lot of time developing technologies to pull these cells out of the blood so we can study both metastasis, as well as cancer progression.
Some techniques use the fact that cancer cells are somewhat larger than blood cells so they try to filter them, but some cancer cells are not that large so you can miss a lot that way. Other technologies involve using antibodies against epitopes on tumor …
