Single Cell Adhesion in Cancer Progression

Quantitative assessment of cell adhesion during pathological development can potentially lead to a better elucidation of the mechanisms behind disease progression and improve prognostic accuracy. Concurrent developments in the fields of biosensors and multimodal imaging techniques, and improved understanding of the biophysical principles driving a disease, have contributed to the development of techniques for quantification of cell adhesion strength. Together, these measurements have underscored the importance of a tightly regulated cell adhesion phenotype, exhibited by tissues under pathological progression. Here we discuss some of the techniques that evaluate cell-to-cell and cell-to-substrate adhesion strength across multiple scales of length and time, taking cancer metastasis as our model system.