Secondary goals

摘要

The most insidious thing about cancer is its tendency to spread. A lone primary tumour can be tackled by knife or radiation beam, as well as drugs, with a reasonable hope of success. But once it has metas-tasised, and spread secondary cancers around a patient's body, such treatments are much less likely to be effective for any length of time. Stopping metastasis would thus be a great achievement. And a device created by Matteo Moretti of the Galeazzi Orthopaedic Institute, in Milan, and Roger Kamm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, may be a step towards that goal. Their invention, which they describe in Biomaterials, is a lab-on-a-chip that mimics the metastasis of breast cancer into bone marrow.