Development of a metastatic pancreatic cancer model for the detection and phenotypic analysis of circulating cancer cells

Metastatic spread is of high clinical significance in pancreatic cancers and a strong indicator of long-term disease prognosis. It is commonly hypothesized that a major cause of metastatic disease is the dissemination of cancer cells from the primary tumor into organs of high blood flow, leading to the seeding of satellite tumors that rapidly populate peripheral tissues. Here our group introduces a metastatic pancreatic cancer model in mice that reliably sheds tumor cells into the blood of mice and further demonstrate the utility of this model for both detection of circulating cancer cells as well as the phenotypic analysis of these cells from the primary tumor, those that have shed into the blood, as well as those that have seeded metastatic lesions in the liver.