The Fate of Intravenously Injected Tumor Cells

Haematogenous dissemination of cells from human renal adenocarcinomas

“…injections have shown that many malignant cells are required to produce relatively few tumour nodules in the lungs (Warren & Gates, 1936;Zeidman et al, 1950). Other studies, in which the numbers of cancer cells shed spontaneously into the bloodstream from solid tumours were monitored by means of bioassay or direct counting procedures (Liotta et al, 1974;Butler & Gullino, 1975;Glaves, 1983a), also indicate that the numbers of malignant cells potentially seeded into an organ may be orders of magnitude more than the numbers of spontaneous metastases which subsequently develop.…”

Detection of circulating prostate-specific antigen-positive cells in patients with prostate cancer by flow cytometry and reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction

“…previous studies, some dating back over half a century, have elegantly demonstrated the presence of circulating malignant cells in the peripheral blood of patients with advanced disease (Warren and Gates, 1936;Engell, 1955;Fidler, 1970;Schwartz et al, 1995), without the help of current sophisticated and molecular biology techniques. Previous studies in animals have shown that metastasis does not rely on the random survival of cells released from the primary tumour, but from the selective growth of specialised subpopulations of highly metastatic cells endowed with properties which will allow them successfully to complete each step of the metastatic cascade (Fidler, 1970;Fidler and Kripke, 1977 …”

Fatal pulmonary tumor embolization following peritoneovenous shunting for malignant ascites

“…Of course, the occurrence of pulmonary tumor embolization is a well-recognized spontaneous complication of both carcinomas and sarcomas and, in some cases, is the initial manifestation of the underlying tumor [16][17][18][19][20]. These tumor emboli either undergo necrosis and obliteration or proliferate and infiltrate the surrounding pulmonary parenchyma, establishing themselves as pulmonary metastases [21,22]. In this patient, the pulmonary vasculature, including small-and medium-sized muscular arteries, arterioles, and the capillary bed were diffusely involved by tumor emboli, and histologically, these emboli appeared to be both recent and remote.…”