Longitudinal enumeration and cluster evaluation of circulating tumor cells improve prognostication for patients with newly diagnosed metastatic breast cancer in a prospective observational trial
Background: Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) carry independent prognostic information in patients with metastatic breast cancer (MBC) on different lines of therapy. Moreover, CTC clusters are suggested to add prognostic information to CTC enumeration alone but their significance is unknown in patients with newly diagnosed MBC. We aimed to evaluate whether longitudinal enumeration of circulating tumo