Race to the top: Decoding metastasis
(Medical Xpress) -- One of cancer's greatest and most insidious threats is metastasis the three-dimensional migratory invasion of cancer cells from primary tumors to a distant part of the body. The challenge of defeating cancer lies not only in the fact that the area where the new colony appears is unpredictable, but also that different types of cancer metastasize at different rates and with varying degrees of growth. While standard therapeutic intervention modalities focus on destroying the cancer cells, a new generation of scientists physicists, oncologists, molecular pharmacologists, materials scientists, computational biologists, and engineers working collaboratively has taken a different tack: viewing cancer metastasis as intelligent, cooperative genetically-expressed adaptive behavior that can be decoded and, through emerging techniques in synthetic biology, reprogrammed.