The journal Molecular Cancer Research has published - and highlighted - research by Andrew Armstrong, MD, assistant professor of medicine (Medical Oncology) and surgery, and others.
Here's what the editors wrote about the article, Circulating Tumor Cells from Patients with Advanced Prostate and Breast Cancer Display Both Epithelial and Mesenchymal Markers:
Epithelial-mesenchymal transitions (EMT) and epithelial plasticity are postulated as mechanisms for cancer metastasis and dissemination but clinical evidence of these phenomena to date have largely been lacking. In this study, Armstrong and coworkers found evidence of the common expression of EMT biomarkers (N-cadherin, vimentin, O-cadherin, loss of E-cadherin) accompanied by stem cell marker (CD133) expression in circulating tumor cells (CTC) from men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer and for common N-cadherin and vimentin expression in CTCs of women with metastatic breast cancer. These findings suggest the relevance of EMT to human cancer biology and that current epithelial-based methods of CTC isolation may miss cells that have undergone EMT.Armstrong's coauthors are Matthew S. Marengo, Sebastian Oltean, Gabor Kemeny, Rhonda L. Bitting, James D. Turnbull, Christina I. Herold, Paul K. Marcom, Daniel J. George and Mariano Garcia-Blanco. -