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101. Ho AS, Huang X, Cao H, Christman-Skieller C, Bennewith K, Le QT, Koong AC: Circulating miR-210 as a Novel Hypoxia Marker in Pancreatic Cancer. Transl Oncol 2010, 3:109–113.PubMed Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Authors’ contributions Xixiong Kang initiated the concept. Ruimin Ma and Tao Jiang drafted the manuscript. All authors participated in writing, reading and approving the final manuscript.”
“Background Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) comprises the majority AZD5363 research buy of esophageal cancer in China and it is characterized by a high

incidence and mortality rate [1]. Even though this disease is surgically curable in the early stages, patients often suffer asymptomatic Histamine H2 receptor metastasis that is associated with a high mortality [2]. Evidences have shown that, cancer cells from the original region may disseminate into the peripheral blood (PB) or bone marrow (BM) in the early stage and survive without clinical representation as micrometastasis, an important initial step for recurrence and distant metastases [3, 4]. Thus, it is clearly imperative to monitor these disseminated tumor cells (DTCs), which may contribute to improved diagnosis or prognosis and therefore more appropriate treatments. As a result of the removal by immune system, very few DTCs exist and are undetected by normal methods. So far many different techniques have been applied for enriching and detecting DTCs, but the most commonly used is conventional reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), because of the high degree of sensitivity and specificity, allowing the detection of one malignant cell among 106 ~ 107 monocytes [5]. Accordingly, an appropriate marker used in RT-PCR would be of a paramount importance, which should be expressed only in tumor cells, but not in normal cells.