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Metastasis is the spread of cancer to a part of the body distant from the original primary cancer. This occurs through the transfer of malignant or cancerous cells via lymph or blood. The new occurrences of cancer are called metastases.
This month, Nature Reviews Cancer launches Roadmap articles, in which we ask authors to provide a sense of direction to a field to encourage new lines of thinking and experimentation, as well as opportunities for collaboration.
In this recent study, He et al. establish that chronic stress promotes metastasis through stress-induced formation of neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs).
Metastatic cancer represents the main cause of death in patients with cancer, but metastasis research is hindered by the limited availability of metastatic samples. In this Comment, Desmedt and Carey highlight the opportunities and challenges of post-mortem tissue donation programmes, which represent a complementary and attractive solution to overcome many of the hurdles in metastasis research.