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Nineteen breast cancer patients with measurable metastatic disease who were starting an initial or new line of therapy were evaluated for circulating epithelial cells (CECs) a minimum of 4 times over the course of treatment. In 7 of the 10 CEC+ patients, HER-2 expression was detected on the CECs. CECs expressing HER-2 varied among patients and in serial samples from the same patient including a shift from HER-2- to HER-2+ CECs. These results demonstrate that it is possible to quantify receptors essential for rationally designed therapy using CECs and that reliance on the immunophenotype of the primary tumor can be misleading.
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Hayes et al. (2002) studied this question.
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