Why do cancer patients die?
For those with solid tumors, it’s usually because their cancer has metastasized. It’s spread beyond the spot where it first cropped up — the breast, colon, lung, pancreas, ovary, prostate, testicle or other tissue — and continued to grow and to colonize distant sites around the body.
Metastatic cancer is deadly, although many stage 4 patients are able to prolong their lives with treatments. Metastatic cancer is also one of, if not the most, challenging areas of cancer biology, which is why there hasn’t been a ton of focused, funded metastatic research and few actual cures.
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center hopes to change that with the launch of the Center for Metastasis Research Excellence, or MET-X, a focused research program aiming to crack one of the toughest biological challenges in medicine.
