Oncology & Cancer

Race to the top: Decoding metastasis

(Medical Xpress) -- One of cancer's greatest and most insidious threats is metastasis – the three-dimensional migratory invasion of cancer cells from primary tumors to a distant part of the body. The challenge of defeating ...

Oncology & Cancer

Rock And Rho: Proteins that help cancer cells groove

Biologists at The Johns Hopkins University have discovered that low oxygen conditions, which often persist inside tumors, are sufficient to initiate a molecular chain of events that transforms breast cancer cells from being ...

Immunology

New synthetic molecules treat autoimmune disease in mice

A team of Weizmann Institute scientists has turned the tables on an autoimmune disease. In such diseases, including Crohn's and rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system mistakenly attacks the body's tissues. But the scientists ...

Oncology & Cancer

Liver metastasis, metabolism, and a therapeutic conundrum

A new study led by researchers at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC) has identified a crucial factor that can drive tumor cells to spread to the liver. The work, which is published in the current issue ...

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Metastasis

Metastasis (Greek: displacement, μετά=next + στάσις=placement, plural: metastases), or Metastatic disease, sometimes abbreviated mets, is the spread of a disease from one organ or part to another non-adjacent organ or part. Only malignant tumor cells and infections have the established capacity to metastasize; however, this is recently reconsidered by new research.

Cancer cells can break away, leak, or spill from a primary tumor, enter lymphatic and blood vessels, circulate through the bloodstream, and settle down to grow within normal tissues elsewhere in the body. Metastasis is one of three hallmarks of malignancy (contrast benign tumors). Most tumors and other neoplasms can metastasize, although in varying degrees (e.g., glioma and basal cell carcinoma rarely metastasize).

When tumor cells metastasize, the new tumor is called a secondary or metastatic tumor, and its cells are like those in the original tumor. This means, for example, that, if breast cancer metastasizes to the lungs, the secondary tumor is made up of abnormal breast cells, not of abnormal lung cells. The tumor in the lung is then called metastatic breast cancer, not lung cancer.

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