Oncology & Cancer

New research opens the 'black box' of malignant melanoma

When malignant melanoma metastasizes to the brain, it is a death sentence for most patients. Metastatic melanoma is the deadliest of the skin cancers and the mechanisms that govern early metastatic growth and interactions ...

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 ...

Medical research

Lung disease and melanoma: A common molecular mechanism?

A Yale-led team of researchers has solved a biological mystery about the common genesis of many serious diseases such as asthma and metastatic melanoma, identifying the first known pathway by which their cellular functions ...

Oncology & Cancer

Protein found to play key role in the spread of pancreatic cancer

Researchers from the University of Liverpool working with colleagues from around the globe have found an explanation for how pancreatic cancer spreads to the liver. These findings potentially hold the key to stopping this ...

Oncology & Cancer

A new therapy proves effective against brain metastasis

A study published in Nature Medicine by a team led by Manuel Valiente, head of the Brain Metastasis Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), shows that the administration of silibinin in patients with ...

Oncology & Cancer

Researchers identify drug against the formation of metastasis

The most deadly aspect of breast cancer is metastasis, cancer cells spreading throughout the body. Researchers at the University and the University Hospital of Basel have now discovered a substance that suppresses the formation ...

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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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