Molecular-targeted probes are emerging with applications for optical biopsy of cancer. An underexplored potential clinical use of these probes is to monitor residual cancer micrometastases that escape cytoreductive surgery and chemotherapy. Here, we show that leukocytes, or white blood cells, residing in nontumor tissues--as well as those infiltrating micrometastatic lesions--uptake cancer cell...

Molecular-targeted probes are emerging with applications for optical biopsy of cancer. An underexplored potential clinical use of these probes is to monitor residual cancer micrometastases that escape cytoreductive surgery and chemotherapy. Here, we show that leukocytes, or white blood cells, residing in nontumor tissues—as well as those infiltrating micrometastatic lesions—uptake cancer cell-t...

A case of single breast metastasis from colon adenocarcinoma, with omolateral axillary micrometastasis, is reported with a brief review of the pertinent literature. The originality of the oncological concept of metastasis from metastasis, through lymphatics penetration, is discussed in the setting of a rare condition of breast metastasis from a colorectal carcinoma. The demonstration of axillar...

The validity and clinical usefulness of the sentinel node (SN) concept for breast cancer has been confirmed, and individualized limited surgery based on diagnosis of SN metastasis is presently performed. In the future, SN navigation surgery (SNNS) will be actively applied to the treatment of early gastric cancer, and an intraoperative real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (R...

The goal of this study was to determine if patients with stage D0-3 prostatic adenocarcinoma have detectable hematogenous micrometastasis. Polymerase chain reaction amplification of prostate-specific antigen mRNA, which is exclusively expressed by prostatic epithelial cells, was used to detect circulating prostatic cells. Peripheral venous blood was obtained from 17 control and 12 prostate canc...

Histological, immunological, and molecular methods have been used for detecting micrometastases from nonhematopoietic malignancies. Early studies utilizing cytological methods to identify circulating tumor cells demonstrated the uncertain significance of micrometastasis detection for predicting eventual recurrent disease. Recently, reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) for th...