Rajesh, this of course depends on the type of tumor cells you want to isolate. Do you want to cultivate them or just detect them. Do you want to detect the total number per ml or do you look for single tumor cells you can characterize. Are you looking for disseminated epithelial tumor cells or cells of a different origin?

Basically, if you are looking for cells of epthelial origin you can try collecting anticoagulated blood like in Wiedmeyer 2007 PMID:

17343355 and make a PBMC preparation using Lymphoprep, Ficoll or the like. You can then spin the cells to adhesive microscope slides and perform IHC or other stainings. as I said, it depends on what your setting is and what you are up to.

thank you very much Bernhard Peball.Actually my aim is to determine the drug efficacy on solid tumor as well as on the cells undergoing for metastasis from the tumor. during my tumor implantation to the mice ,i want to to see the effect of in vivo cell migration inhibition from tumor to other parts. according to your suggestion i will optimise as per my experiment plan..thanks again...

Screen cell has a filter system which they use -- and can be used to cell blocks, and molecular/histology. Our recent experience with this technology was published in Pancreas. This was from human specimens however.

I also believe that it is possible by tumor cell adherence from total PBMC preparation. However, at that time some other cells will be adhered, like, macrophages. Stain these cells. If tumor marker is not known, you can stain other cells, like mac and DCs. So unstained cells may be counted keeping morphology of all cells in mind. Decrease represents drug response. Is it?

If you are referring to human cells from mouse that's one thing. If you are isolating mouse CTCs from circulation then this is another issue. 

Cell adherence depends on the tumor type and your unknown cell's characteristics. Keep in mind that macrophages and fibroblasts can adhere as well so you would not get a pure population of CTCs in this method.

Cell screening for the commonly used EpCAM antibody (for epithelial cells, suitable for epithelial tumors that have not gone through EMT) can be done by FACS or magnetic microbead separation.

You can also try to deplete the RBCs by lysis or Ficol and then deplete the non-CTC cells by Lin- (lineage depletion kits, such as Miltenyi's), leaving you with the rare CD34+ HSCs and your CTCs.

And finally there is a method of microfluidic separation of your cells directly from full blood, based on their size. 

good luck.

Filtration is probably the easiest method the isolate the tumor cells from the mouse blood.

We have developed an affordable and simple to use filtration system that allows filtration of small volumes of whole blood followed by labelling, permeabilizing and washing of the collected cells directly on the sieve membrane, after the filtration has been completed. Our silicon microsieves have an atomically flat membrane without auto-fluorescence and are an ideal surface for fluorescence imaging of the collected cells.

Please take a look at www.vycap.com

www.vycap.com