Prostate cancer diaspora: Cancer cells leave the primary tumor through various paths (lymphatics, nerves, blood vessels) and disperse through the blood stream to target organs. Nearly 100% of men with metastatic prostate cancer demonstrate involvement in the bones.
THE CANCER DIASPORA...
Metastasis is the consequence of a cancer cell that disperses from the primary tumor, travels throughout the body, and invades and colonizes a distant site. Describing metastasis in terms of a simple one-way migration of cells from the primary to the target organs is an insufficient to explain what happens during cancer spread. The social science concept of a diaspora refers to the scattering of people away from an established homeland. The Pienta lab utilizes the concept of "diaspora" to understand metastasis. The diaspora paradigm takes into account, and models, several variables including: the quality of the primary tumor microenvironment, the fitness of individual cancer cell migrants as well as migrant populations, the rate of bidirectional migration of cancer and host cells between cancer sites, and the quality of the target microenvironments to establish metastatic sites.