Metastasis movies, macrophages, molecules and more

Between 18 and 20 November 2002, the conference entitled ‘Mechanisms of Invasion and Metastasis’ took place, organized by Richard Hynes and Joan Massague. Twenty‐three speakers and a similar number of participants gathered in the auditorium of the gleaming Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncologicas (CNIO) in Madrid, Spain, under the gracious hospitality of its director, Mariano Barbacid.![][1] This timely and illuminating conference revealed that the study of metastatic disease is advancing at a rapid pace. No longer simply descriptive or phenomenological, the investigation of malignancy is now a modern, molecular endeavour that takes advantage of complex genetic manipulations, sophisticated mouse models and real‐time in vivo imaging techniques, as well as global analyses of gene expression. Such approaches are yielding mechanistic insights into this complex and crucial aspect of cancer aetiology and treatment. In turn, these are leading to the development of new therapeutic compounds, some of which are now in promising clinical trials. In this report, I highlight some of the main findings that were described and trends that emerged at the conference.Metastasis refers to the dissemination of cancer cells from an initial tumour to distant sites. As this invasion and spreading is usually the cause of mortality in cancer patients, this area of research is crucial. Metastasis begins with the local invasion of tumour cells into the surrounding stroma, and continues with their passage through the endothelial lining and into the vasculature. This is followed by their escape from blood vessels, and their colonization and growth in distant organs. One of the themes of this meeting was that there is more than one way for tumour cells to move around, and they are often unwittingly assisted by other cell types in their quest to survive, travel and proliferate.### Tumour cells do not do it aloneTumour–macrophage interactions. Several speakers pointed out that, in contrast to textbook … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif