RE: Stable Disease - a definition16 Mar 2023 19:07
Hi Hasiba,
I believe you are correct. The clinician will have found no secondary tumor site using ordinary scans over a period of time. Mia has pointed out that there are methods of capturing intact circulating tumor cells but they are not broadly adopted at the moment. Such methods would certainly give a better picture of what is happening in the blood stream... My question is, can CTC's (and clusters for that matter) leave the leading edge of the primary tumor whilst disease is stable? As we are not testing for ctDNA fragments or intact tumor cells then we don't know...Thinking about it, yes, it must surely be the case that CTC's can spread though? Just sheer bad luck for the patient and not necessarily a reflection of the therapy effectiveness if a secondary tumor seeds? The only way to stop cancer spread is to kill it I guess? But that of course will not be the only outcome. As others have pointed out, extending life and quality of life will be one of the main outcomes for many modi patients.