Metastatic Cancer Research

NCI’s Dr. Rosandra Kaplan discusses important trends in metastatic cancer research and new ideas for treating and preventing metastatic cancer.

Researchers have used modified stem cells to deliver a cancer drug selectively to metastatic breast cancer tumors in mice. The stem cells target metastatic tumors by homing in on the stiff environment that typically surrounds them.

Information about the NCI-MATCH precision medicine trial, in which researchers will examine tumor tissue from patients with advanced solid tumors and lymphomas that have stopped responding to treatment and assign patients to treatment arms based on the molecular profiles of their disease.

Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have reported the results of an initiative to characterize the genetic mutations in tumors from more than 10,000 patients with advanced cancer treated at the center.

In a clinical trial involving patients with metastatic cancer, administration of zoledronic acid every 12 weeks was as effective at preventing skeletal-related events caused by bone metastases as administration every 4 weeks.

Cancer cells may exploit a normal function of neutrophils, the most common form of white blood cell, to help form metastatic tumors, a new study suggests.

In this phase I clinical trial, HIV-positive patients receiving combination antiretroviral therapy who have cancer that has recurred after or has not responded to previous treatment will receive the immune checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab.

In some patients with cancer that has spread to the brain, whole brain radiation following radiosurgery causes more severe cognitive decline and does not improve survival compared with radiosurgery alone, a new study has found.

In this trial, doctors will collect T lymphocytes from the blood of patients with advanced mesothelin-expressing cancer and genetically engineer these cells to recognize mesothelin. The gene-engineered cells will then be multiplied and infused into the patients to fight their cancer.

Cardiac tumors that originate in the heart itself are extremely rare. The highly specialized and most abundant cell in the heart may explain why the organ is such an inhospitable host to cancer.