The second leading cause of death in the United States, cancer is at its most dangerous as it spreads to secondary locations. Cancer cells in the blood stream, or circulating tumor cells (CTCs), present an opportunity to study metastasis provided they may be extracted successfully from blood. Engineers have accelerated the development of technologies that achieve this goal based on exploiting differences between tumor cells and surrounding blood cells such as varying expression patterns of membrane proteins or physical characteristics. Collaboration with biologists and clinicians has allowed additional analysis and will lead to the use of these rare cells to their full potential in the fight against cancer.

中文翻译：

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将微流体结合到循环肿瘤细胞分离中，以用于临床应用。

在美国，第二大死亡原因是癌症扩散到次要位置时处于最危险的状态。血液中的癌细胞或循环中的肿瘤细胞（CTC）提供了研究转移的机会，条件是可以成功地从血液中提取它们。工程师基于开发肿瘤细胞与周围血细胞之间的差异（例如膜蛋白的不同表达模式或物理特性），加快了实现这一目标的技术的开发。与生物学家和临床医生的合作允许进行更多分析，并将使这些稀有细胞发挥最大的潜力来对抗癌症。