© ISTOCK.COM/MAN_AT_MOUSE
Although metastasis is responsible for 90 percent of cancer-related deaths, it’s one of the least-studied aspects of cancer—perhaps because it is one of the trickiest to investigate.
Metastases can be established in mice either by injecting cancer cells into organs or the bloodstream, or by using animals genetically engineered to spontaneously develop tumors that then metastasize on their own. Injected cells may come from mutated cell lines, spontaneously grown animal tumors, or cancerous human tissues.
“Each one’s profoundly different and all have potential value,” says John Condeelis, who studies metastasis at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Yet the frequency of metastases in many animal models is low, and each method used to model the metastatic process can only recapitulate some of the ...
