Circulating Tumor Microemboli: Characteristics and Clinical Relevance

It is well known that the mortality rate due to cancer is high; moreover, it is closely related to metastatic condition. Therefore, the major difficulty is to control cancer, since it harbors heterogeneous characteristics and the processes, which are coordinated by a precise and well-organized machinery. The heterogeneity may be represented at many different levels: interpatient, intrapatient, and intratumoral. Additionally, the heterogeneity comes from the different cellular clones that arise from hundreds of signaling and molecular mechanisms and cellular interactions.