Skip to main content

Tumor metastasis

Edited by Jian Zhang and Chao-Nan Qian

Every year, more than 8 million people die from cancer worldwide and the majority of them are actually killed by cancer metastasis. Current knowledge of cancer metastasis is limited. Many questions remain unanswered. For example, when and how do cancer cells actually spread from the primary tumor to the sentinel lymph node? How do they further travel to distant organs from the lymph node? What are the driving molecules promoting cancer metastasis? And how do different types of cancer rely on different molecular mechanisms for metastasis? With the help of high through-put technologies plus big data analyses, we are hoping to accelerate our endeavors in unveiling cancer metastasis.

In this thematic series on metastasis, we are excited about new insights into the roles of different genes in controlling metastasis via influencing epithelial-mesenchymal transition, and the involvement of immune cells as well as tumor microenvironment alteration for metastasis. A collection of the 150 most important genes promoting cancer metastasis in this series will also be very useful for future big data analyses.

This series was published in Chinese Journal of Cancer

  1. Metastasis is the major cause of treatment failure in cancer patients and of cancer-related deaths. This editorial discusses how cancer metastasis may be better perceived and controlled. Based on big-data anal...

    Authors: Chao-Nan Qian, Yan Mei and Jian Zhang
    Citation: Chinese Journal of Cancer 2017 36:38
  2. The chemoresistance of prostate cancer (PCa) is invariably associated with the aggressiveness and metastasis of this disease. New emerging evidence indicates that the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT)...

    Authors: Wenchu Wang, Lihui Wang, Atsushi Mizokami, Junlin Shi, Chunlin Zou, Jinlu Dai, Evan T. Keller, Yi Lu and Jian Zhang
    Citation: Chinese Journal of Cancer 2017 36:35
  3. Prostate cancer tissue is composed of both cancer cells and host cells. The milieu of host components that compose the tumor is termed the tumor microenvironment (TME). Host cells can be those derived from the...

    Authors: Jinlu Dai, Yi Lu, Hernan Roca, Jill M. Keller, Jian Zhang, Laurie K. McCauley and Evan T. Keller
    Citation: Chinese Journal of Cancer 2017 36:29