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Fact sheet: Metastatic cancer is cancer that has spread from the place where it first started to another place in the body. A tumor formed by metastatic cancer cells is called a metastatic tumor or a metastasis.

Cancer usually begins with one tumor in a specific area of the body. But if the tumor is not removed, cancer has the ability to spread to nearby organs as well as places far away from the origin, like the brain. How does cancer move to these new areas and why are some organs more likely to get infected than others? Ivan Seah Yu Jun explains the three common routes of metastasis.

4:43 Cancer usually begins with one tumor in a specific area of the body. But if the tumor is not removed, cancer has the ability to spread to nearby organs as well as places far away from the origin, like the brain. How does cancer move to these new areas and why are some organs more likely to get infected than others? Ivan Seah Yu Jun explains the three common routes of metastasis.

The worst cancer cells don't sit still. Instead they metastasize-migrate from their original sites and establish new tumors in other parts of the body. Once a cancer spreads, it is harder to eliminate. A study by developmental biologists offers a fresh clue to how cancer cells acquire the ability to invade other tissues-a prerequisite for metastasis. It reveals that invasion requires cells to stop dividing. Therefore, the two processes- invasion and proliferation-are mutually exclusive. The finding could inform cancer therapies, which typically target rapidly proliferating cancer cells.

4:43 video Cancer usually begins with one tumor in a specific area of the body. But if the tumor is not removed, cancer has the ability to spread to nearby organs as well as places far away from the origin, like the brain. How does cancer move to these new areas and why are some organs more likely to get infected than others? Ivan Seah Yu Jun explains the three common routes of metastasis. 

1:07 animation video metastasis 1/4 under age 85 die of cancer

When a person dies from cancer, the culprit is usually not the original tumor but rather the cancerous cells that spread throughout the body and replicate in distant organs, a process called metastasis. Researchers have long known that metastasizing cancer cells slip their bonds and avoid immune detection by altering the sugars on their surfaces. They've even come up with a would-be drug to prevent such sugar alterations. But that compound interferes with needed sugars on normal cells, too, with lethal results in animals. Now, Dutch researchers report that they've packaged the drug in nanoparticles targeted exclusively to cancer cells, and they've shown that this combination prevents cancer cells from metastasizing in mice.  

Engineers at MIT and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) have devised a new way to detect cancer that has spread to the liver, by enlisting help from probiotics - beneficial bacteria similar to those found in yogurt.

New immune system-boosting cancer drugs have in clinical trials saved the lives of many people with seemingly untreatable melanoma or lung cancer, but the drugs seem useless against colon cancer. One exception-a man with colon cancer whose metastatic tumors vanished for several years after he was treated in 2007-piqued researchers' interest. They suspected his recovery might have to do with the large number of mutations in his tumors. Now, a small clinical trial suggests that even cancer patients with types of tumors that were thought to be impervious to the new drugs could benefit if those malignancies have the right error-riddled DNA signature, a result that could help 3% to 4% of cancer patients.