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. 2022 Apr 28;127(5):800–810. doi: 10.1038/s41416-022-01819-1

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© The Author(s) 2022

Open AccessThis 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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Fig. 2 — The in vitro and in vivo expansion of CTCs allow the thorough characterisation of the liquid phase of the metastatic cascade. Although not all CTCs are metastasis-competent, CTCs with specific traits (e.g. stemness) that facilitate metastasis formation can grow in vitro or in immunodeficient mice. Thus, CTC models allow selecting metastasis-initiator CTCs and better understanding of the biology of these CTCs that are the basis of cancer progression.