Tracing the Steps of Metastasis, Cancer's Menacing Ballet

摘要

"We put the cancer cells in last Tuesday," Weili Fu explains, as she slits open a mouse's chest. Speaking over the rapid hiss-click of a miniature ventilator, she threads a tiny catheter into the pulmonary artery and infuses a bolus of dye. Fu and her mentor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Ruth Muschel, keep the lung pressure high until the chemical runs through, highlighting the lungs' blood vessels to help trace the path of human cancer cells injected 8 days ago into the animal's tail. Under a microscope, the tumor cells show up in vivid shades of yellow within blood vessels dyed red―exposing a dynamic view of metastasis, the process by which cancer cells migrate from a primary tumor to other sites in the body.