It’s often cancer’s spread, not the original tumor, that poses the disease’s most deadly risk.“And yet metastasis is one of the most poorly understood aspects of cancer biology,” says Kamen Simeonov, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsyl
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IMAGE: Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania used a novel technique based on the CRIPSR-Cas9 system to precisely track the lineage of cancer cells. They found that that one clone (represented. view more
Credit: University of Pennsylvania
It s often cancer s spread, not the original tumor, that poses the disease s most deadly risk. And yet metastasis is one of the most poorly understood aspects of cancer biology, says Kamen Simeonov, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.
In a new study, a team led by Simeonov and School of Veterinary Medicine professor Christopher Lengner has made strides toward deepening that understanding by tracking the development of metastatic cells. Their work used a mouse model of pancreatic cancer and cutting-edge techniques to trace the lineage and gene expression patterns of individual cancer cells. They found a spectrum of aggression in the cells that arose, with cells that