Metastasis remains the primary challenge to reducing cancer deaths worldwide, says Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) gastrointestinal oncologist Karuna Ganesh, MD, Ph.D..
That's when a primary tumor—colorectal cancer, for example—spreads to a new part of the body, such as the brain, liver, or bones. The new tumor is still colorectal cancer (not brain, liver, or bone cancer ), yet the cells in the new tumor are also radically different from those in the tumor where the cancer started. And the differences between the two are critical.
"Sometimes we say that people don't die from cancer, they die from metastasis," Dr. Ganesh says. "We know how to cure primary tumors—with surgery, and sometimes with chemotherapy and radiation.
Metastatic disease, too, will often respond to first-line therapy, but you can never get rid of all the cancer cells completely. The cancer cells that survive treatment become more and more aggressive, and eventually you can't stop them." Effective treatments against metastasis will require a deeper understanding of both the changes that happen when cells from a primary tumor metastasize and the mechanisms that drive those changes, she adds.
Now a new MSK study, published in Nature and overseen by Dr. Ganesh and MSK computational biologist Dana Pe'er, Ph.D.
, is providing unique insights into metastasis that researchers say point to new therapeutic opportunities. Study illuminates differences between primary and metastatic colorectal cancer .