Intravascular Arrest of Circulating Tumor Cells is a Two-Step Process Exploiting Their Adhesion Repertoire

CD44 Orchestrates Metastatic Teamwork

“…The relevance of CD44 in mediating prometastatic clusters of CTCs was further validated by demonstrating that human patients with detectable clusters of CD44-positive CTCs had worse overall survival. Thus, in addition to its role in identifying cancer cells with stem-like properties (Chaffer et al, 2013;Mani et al, 2008) and in mediating intravascular arrest of CTCs (Osmani et al, 2018), CD44 may further enhance metastatic potential by mediating CTC homophilic interactions.…”