Cancer Cell Collaborators Smooth the Way for Cancer Cells to Metastasize
Sunday, December 13, 2015 - 21:30
in Health & Medicine
To get moving, metastasizing cancer needs to enlist non-cancerous collaborators. Suspicion has fallen on fibroblasts, the cells that secrete and organize the extracellular matrix (ECM), as actively assisting in metastasis. But exactly how these cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) provide aid to the cancer enemy was not known until the discovery by Begum Erdogan and colleagues in Donna Webb's lab at Vanderbilt University of how CAFs clear a highway through the ECM for migrating cancer cells.