Breast cancer in the breast doesn’t kill you: It’s breast cancer that’s traveled out of the breast and into a friendly microenvironment within some organ system — your bones or lungs or liver or brain — where it begins the unchecked cell growth that will eventually become a metastatic tumor.
That’s the breast cancer that kills you.
Not all patients develop metastatic breast cancer, or MBC. But research at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle found that 20% of early-stage breast cancer patients will develop metastasis, also known as stage 4 or secondary cancer, within 20 years of their original diagnosis.
There are currently many therapies, but no cures for metastatic disease. There’s also no consensus as to why some patients develop “mets” and some don’t, although scientists do know that not all cancer cells that escape a primary cancer site automatically become distant metastatic tumors.
But two new studies from the Hutch’s Ghajar Lab, one published this week in Nature Cell Biology (and another in the January 2022 issue of Nature Cancer), have provided intriguing answers to key questions about metastatic disease.
