Dr. James Tomlinson is an Associate Professor of the David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine in the Department of Surgery, Division of Surgical Oncology. He also is a member of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the California Nanosystems Institute. Dr. Tomlinson’s clinical focus is on the treatment of pancreatic cancer and has published many papers defining outcome, stage and quality of life for patients with cancer of the pancreas. Dr. Tomlinson’s basic science efforts have focused on antibody based imaging of pancreatic cancer, development of novel targeted therapeutics and the biology of pancreatic cancer metastasis. Recently through a partnership with CytoLumina, Dr. Tomlinson and his co-workers investigated the utility of CTCs detected by NanoVelcro Chips as an adjunctive biomarker for diagnosis and staging in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma (PDAC) at the time of disease presentation. They first isolated CTCs from metastatic PDAC patients and performed single cell KRAS mutational analysis to confirm tumor origin thus validating the immunocytochemical definition of pancreatic CTCs. Under Dr. Tomlinson’s guidance more than 100 consecutive, pre-treatment patients with either a suspicious pancreatic lesion or recent diagnosis of PDAC have had CTCs captured, identified, and enumerated. CTC presence and enumeration have been subsequently compared with clinical and pathologic information. observations demonstrate pancreatic tumor origin of CTCs via KRAS mutation analysis and thus the presence of CTCs functioned strongly as a diagnostic test at the time of disease presentation. Furthermore, increasing CTCs counts were associated with higher likelihood of systemic disease at the time of disease presentation. Dr. Tomlinson’s results suggest the potential utility of CTCs as a liquid biopsy for establishing diagnosis and improving staging to better inform initial therapeutic decisions in the pre-treatment setting.