Metastasis and Cancer Spread - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems
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Metastasis
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Hi in this video, I'm gonna be talking about metastasis. So what is metastasis that is the ability of cancer cells to enter into the bloodstream and travel throughout the body and sort of, you know, invade those tissues and very distant bodily organs and cause cancer there. The interesting part of this is when we think of cancer, we oftentimes think that, oh, it's so easy, cancer is just going to very quickly metastasized to other parts of the body but essentially isn't the case. Very few cells can survive and traveling through the bloodstream, but the cells that do typically enter the bloodstream travel to the lymph nodes where they set up shop, which is oftentimes what we hear, you know, people having, you know, benign cancer but it's also in their lymph nodes. So that's kind of the first step set up shop then, but eventually they will travel more and travel to more distant tissues away from the primary tumor which is the first tumor that formed. So we actually don't have really a good idea anything about what causes cancer cells to metastasize. We know that they do and they do it often. But I mean, I can't present to you, you know, if this happens first, this happens second. The only thing I can tell you is that there's a GPS road Gps um that is important for metastases. So we know that if cancer cells don't have this or if it's if it's acting properly. Um then, you know, generally they don't metastasize, but no one is really sure the pathway how does road gPS, you know, prevent against metastases. No one really knows. But they're thinking that this is kind of the place to start now. The other important thing to talk about metastasis is talking about the tumor micro environment. So this is gonna be the environment in which the tumor lives in. You can imagine that environment can have a big effect on the tumor. So it can influence the tumor's growth. Um It can influence whether it can invade and metastasize. So this includes all the nutrients and growth factors and things surrounding the cell and the tumor. The tumor micro environment can also support this process called angiogenesis which we've talked about before. And angiogenesis is the growth of new blood vessels where they really shouldn't be. So we don't normally grow new blood vessels in the middle of art organs where there wouldn't necessarily need to be anything but tumor cells produced this large mass that needs nutrients. And so angiogenesis, the process of forming those blood vessels in these big tumor masses. And this is because tumors that lack of blood supply will die because they don't have oxygen and they don't have nutrients. So a lot of um a lot of cancer treatments are actually now trying to target the formation of blood vessels, right? Because if we know that it sells can't form these blood vessels, then they will eventually die because they don't have a new chance. So here's just a very um simple diagram. You can see cancer cells. So here's an original tumor. You can see it's invading into the bloodstream. It's traveling, we can imagine it travels pretty far away, but eventually it will exit and form this secondary tumor. And it's some type of distant location, whether you know, in a local lymph node nearby or completely across the body, in a completely different organ. Um So that's metastasis. So with that, let's now turn the page.
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Problem
Many cells do not survive traveling through the blood stream.
