Review of Research Paper on Metastasis of Cancerous Tumors

Introduction Early diagnosis provides the best hope many have in beating cancer. Unfortunately, this is not the end of the fight for many cancer patients. Primary tumors may be successfully treated early, only to later discover they have metastasized to other areas of the body. The common medical definition of metastasis is: The spread of cancer from one part of the body to another. Tumors formed from cells that have spread are called â€Å"secondary tumors† and contain cells that are like those in the original (primary) tumor. This definition could be the reason why early treatment of a primary tumor is ineffective against metastatic tumor cells. As the definition suggests, the accepted model for the metastasis of tumor cells is through clonal evolution, where secondary tumors have similar genomes to the primary tumor. Recent studies suggest, however, that this may not be accurate. Significant divergence between primary and secondary tumors in renal cell metastases and breast metastases has been discovered in recent studies. An alternative model, one of a parallel evolution, would explain why therapies aimed at primary tumors are unsuccessful against metastatic cells. Further research on this alternative model could lead to therapies that not only target the properties of the primary tumor but also those of the secondary tumor and save many from the burden of fighting cancer again. Methods This study took 386 breast cancer patients and split them into two groups. M0, patients showing cells with no metastasis, and M1 patients, those that showed metastasis and performed a genomic analysis, or comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) of the Cytokeratin... ... tumor cells that could potentially disseminate, mutate, change, and grow into another tumor. More emphasis needs to be put on the development of disseminated cells because the changes in their growth cannot be reflected by the genomic data obtained from the primary tumor data; as a result, they can not be dealt with in the same manner. The main idea of this study is to underscore: "the need to validate potential cellular targets for adjuvant and systemic therapies on disseminated cancer cells directly"( Cancer Cell: July 2003). The paper that is being discussed is : Gray, J.W., Evidence emerges for early metastasis and parallel evolution of primary and metastatic tumors. Cancer Cell July 2003. Schmidt-Kittler, O. et al., From latent disseminated cells to overt metastasis: genetic analysis of systemic breast cancer progression. PNAS 100, 7734 (2003).