Homing in on how cancer spreads

Scientists have found how cancer spreads from a primary site to other places in the body, a finding that could open doors for new ways of treating and preventing advanced disease.

Instead of a cell just breaking off from a tumor and traveling through the bloodstream to another organ, where it forms a secondary tumor, or metastasis, the cancer appears to send out envoys to prepare the new site.

Intercepting those envoys, or blocking their action with drugs, might help to prevent the spread of cancer or to treat it in patients in which it has already occurred.

“We are basically looking at all the earlier steps that are involved in metastasis that we weren’t previously aware of. It is complex, but we are opening the door to all these things that occur before the tumor cell implants itself,” said Dr. David Lyden, a pediatric oncologist at Cornell University in New York and an author of the study. “It is a map to where the metastasis will occur.”

In animal and laboratory studies, the scientists looked at how breast, lung and esophageal cancers spread. .

The research was reported in the Dec. 8 issue of the journal Nature.