Decoding the complexity of metastasis

• 作者: Yingcheng Wu Tiancheng Zhang Xiaoming Zhang Qiang Gao
• 来源期刊: 癌症生物学与医学（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2022,（3）
• 所属期刊栏目: PERSPECTIVE
• 页码范围: 284-288
• 页数: 5页
• 语种: 英文
• DOI: 10.20892/j.issn.2095-3941.2022.0031

摘要

Cancer metastasis remains one of the most confounding questions in oncology1,2. Although current cutting-edge techniques enable very early detection of tumors, profiling whether a tumor has already begun to spread and where it has attempted to colonize remains a major hurdle. Indeed, metastatic seeding events exhibit remarkable temporal and spatial -heterogeneity, wherein the origin (primary site) and destination (metastatic site) are highly dynamic. For example, liver metastasis is particularly common and remains a lead-ing cause of mortality3. Primary cancers are diverse and can include gastrointestinal cancer, such as colorectal cancer and pancreatic cancer, as well as cancers of extraperitoneal origin, such as breast cancer, which has heterogeneous clinical phe-notypes and a range of therapeutic responses. Because exist-ing knowledge of cross-tissue metastasis remains far from complete, the generation of a unified pan-cancer metastasis map remains a pressing need. In this perspective, we outline the growing advances in metastasis biology, with a focus on the challenges in using high--throughput technologies and the state-of-the-art -theories among the metastasis research community.