An approach of selecting appropriate markers from the primary tumor to enable detection of circulating tumor cells in patients with non-small cell lung cancer.

Purpose: Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are rare and difficult to isolate, and require selecting minimal but appropriate markers. The aim of this study was to identify markers in the primary non small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) tissue to guide isolation of CTCs from the peripheral blood of patients with lung cancer.

Methods: The expression of CK-19, EGFR and MUC-1 was evaluated by RT-PCR in the NSCLC tumor and paired adjacent normal tissues from 27 patients.