Normal human cells need just the right amount of oxygen — not too much nor too little to be in healthy condition but in cancer cells often are starved of oxygen — a condition called hypoxia. In Cancer oxygen metabolism is very important.
Metastasis is the spread of cancer cells from the place where they first formed to another part of the body. In metastasis, cancer cells break away from the original tumor, travel through the blood or lymph system, and form a new tumor in other organs or tissues of the body.
However, the biological phenomena that trigger the shedding of CTC clusters from a primary cancerous lesion are not fully understood. Now researchers from the University of Basel report that a lack of oxygen is responsible for the separation of CTC clusters from the tumor. From Cell Report magazine Their findings, “Hypoxia Triggers the Intravasation of Clustered Circulating Tumor Cells,” have been published in the journal Cell Reports and were led by Nicola Aceto, PhD, Swiss National Science Foundation assistant professor and group leader of the Cancer Metastasis Lab at the University of Basel.