Longitudinal far red gene-reporter imaging of cancer metastasis in preclinical models: a tool for accelerating drug discovery.

In this short communication, we demonstrate for the first time, the use of far red fluorescent gene reporter, iRFP to longitudinally and non-invasively track the in vivo process of lymphatic metastases from an orthotopic site of mammary implantation through lymphatic vessels and to draining lymph nodes. Potentially useful to accelerate cancer drug discovery as an in vivo screening tool to monitor the pharmacological arrest of metastasis, we show that the custom as well as commercial small animal imaging devices have adequate performance to detect the gene reporter in stably expressing metastatic cancer cells.