A large-scale study of MT1-MMP as a marker for isolated tumor cells in peripheral blood and bone marrow in gastric cancer cases.

Background Recently, a marker for predicting metastasis or recurrence precisely in solid cancers has been focused on instead of the identification of isolated tumor cells detected by epithelial genes in circulating system. We identified a candidate marker in gastric cancer by microarray and validated it through a quantitative real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay.