Only a minority of cancer cells have the potential to initiate metastatic growth, but the factors that limit metastatic colonization remain mostly unknown. Malanchi et al. (2012) recently demonstrated that stromal periostin is crucial for metastatic colonization by regulating the interactions between breast cancer stem cells and their metastatic niche.

BACKGROUND Immune cells (lymphocytes and macrophages) provide the microenvironment for immune surveillance of metastatic prostate cancer (PCa) cells in pelvic lymph nodes. We have hypothesized that degeneration and/or apoptosis of metastatic PCa cells in pelvic lymph nodes can distinguish between aggressive and non-aggressive metastatic disease in patients. Our objective was to define the relat...

Mucinous tumors of the pancreas are rare and the diagnosis of invasive carcinoma can be a dilemma. While metastatic disease from mucinous cystadenocarcinoma (MCAC) and invasive intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms (IPMN) have been reported, no extraperitoneal mucinous cystic metastatic disease has been described. When metastatic, the overall survival rates for invasive adenocarcinoma, mucin...

BACKGROUND Approximately 4-25% of patients with early prostate cancer develop disease recurrence following radical prostatectomy. OBJECTIVE To identify a molecular subgroup of prostate cancers with metastatic potential at presentation resulting in a high risk of recurrence following radical prostatectomy. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Unsupervised hierarchical clustering was performed u...

The biology of the metastatic colonization process remains a poorly understood phenomenon. To improve our knowledge of its dynamics, we conducted a modelling study based on multi-modal data from an orthotopic murine experimental system of metastatic renal cell carcinoma. The standard theory of metastatic colonization usually assumes that secondary tumours, once established at a distant site, gr...