Dr Catherine Alix-Panabières received her PhD degree in 1998 at the Institute of Virology, University Louis Pasteur, in Strasbourg in France. In 1999, she moved to the University Medical Centre of Montpellier. During the last decades, Dr Alix-Panabières has focused on optimizing new techniques of enrichment, detection and characterization of viable circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in patients with solid tumors. She is the expert for the EPISPOT technology which has been recently improved to detect functional CTCs at the single cell level (EPIDROP). Dr Catherine Alix-Panabières & Prof Pantel coined for the first time the term ‘Liquid Biopsy’ in 2010 (Trends Mol Med). As an associate professor, in 2013, she became the new director of the Laboratory of Rare Human Circulating Cells (LCCRH) in the Department of Pathology and Onco-Biology. In this unique platform, they isolate, detect and characterize CTCs using combinations many technologies. She has authored or co-authored >100 scientific publications and book chapters in this field during the last years, she is the inventor of three patents in the liquid biopsy field and she is part of several French & European projects. It was a great honor for her to receive the Gallet et Breton Cancer Prize, the highest honor conferred by the French Academy of Medicine in November 2012 and, more recently, the 2017 AACR Award for the most cited scientific article in 2015 (Cayrefourcq et al. Cancer Res).