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. 2021 Feb 2;11:2800. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-82634-1

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© The Author(s) 2021

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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The cellular biology of cancer cells in circulation is poorly understood, hindering the development of efficient therapies. The majority of current treatments are aimed at treating the primary tumor or their metastatic deposits. There is little known about the treatment of cells in circulation, which are also called circulating tumor cells (CTCs). It remains unclear how some cells within the primary tumor can survive prolonged circulation to develop metastatic disease.