Cover Image

Abstract

Metastasis, responsible for most cancer related deaths, is the process by which cancer cells break free of a tumor and move to a new location where they set up shop and set about killing the organism. The process is extremely complex and involves escaping the tumor, breaking into the blood vessels, traveling through the body, exiting the blood stream and finding a cell that is receptive to the attachments of the tumor cell. As with a primary tumor, whose growth can be inhibited by the expression of tumor suppressor genes, metastasis suppressor genes have also been identified. Nm23 has been identified as a very important metastasis suppressor gene. The cover of this month’s issue of Cancer Biology & Therapy is a confocal immunofluorescence image of a cell overexpressing cdc42, a Rho family member important in invasion and cell movement (in red) and Dbl-1, an oncoprotein previously implicated in metastasis and a guanine exchange factor (GEF) for cdc42 (in green). The two proteins co-localize at the cell membrane and in the cytoplasm (yellow). To learn how Nm23-H1 interacts with these two proteins to suppress cell movement, see the paper by Murakami and colleagues.