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In most cases of cancer, the disease becomes more life threatening when cells leave the original tumour site and begin colonising other organs – a process called metastasis. But metastatic cancer cells don’t settle just anywhere. Depending on the original type of cancer, certain organs tend to be favoured over others. Breast cancer cells, for example, tend to migrate to brain, bones, liver and lung. Scientists are beginning to figure out the molecular codes responsible for such targeting, and have recently discovered proteins expressed in breast cancer cells that enable brain colonisation – the proteins facilitate the cells’ entry into the brain and shield them from immune attack. Pictured are such metastatic cells (green) growing in the brain having overcome the immune defences (red). By identifying these molecular access signals, researchers hope to develop strategies to block them and therefore halt the deadly spread.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image by Remi Klotz in the Yu lab, USC
• Stem Cell Biology & Regenerative Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Cancer Discovery, October 2019