Unlocking the mysteries of metastasis

"Remarkably, real progress in understanding the processes of metastasis has only happened in the last couple of decades, even though the concept was known in the 1800s. For a long time metastasis was thought to be too complicated, too complex, to be understood. It was thought there were no rules to how it happened. It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that researchers showed that there were rules, that certain tumors metastasized to particular organs, and that you could manipulate them to understand why. Today we know that metastasis involves several steps, though we don't know everything about each step." Continue reading the American Cancer Society's Expert Voices blog here.