Abstract
Metastasis is the main cause of death in people with cancer. To colonize distant organs, circulating tumour cells must overcome many obstacles through mechanisms that we are only now starting to understand. These include infiltrating distant tissue, evading immune defences, adapting to supportive niches, surviving as latent tumour-initiating seeds and eventually breaking out to replace the host tissue. They make metastasis a highly inefficient process. However, once metastases have been established, current treatments frequently fail to provide durable responses. An improved understanding of the mechanistic determinants of such colonization is needed to better prevent and treat metastatic cancer.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank K. Ganesh and T. Wiesner for useful input. J.M. was supported by US National Institutes of Health grants CA163167 and CA129243, the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs of the US Department of Defense, Cancer Center Support Grant P30 CA008748 and the Center for Metastasis Research of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. A.C.O. was an Erwin Schröedinger Fellowship awardee (J3013, Austrian Science Fund).
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Massagué, J., Obenauf, A. Metastatic colonization by circulating tumour cells. Nature 529, 298–306 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17038
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17038
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