Robert Weinberg

We've been interested for a number of years in the problem of metastatic awakening: that is, how dormant cancer cells that have spread to distant tissues remain in those tissues in an inactive, non-proliferating state for periods of months and even years, and then suddenly, after the passage of time, become awakened, start growing aggressively, and generate new tumors or metastases. Ninety percent of cancer associated mortality comes from metastatic growths rather than the primary tumors themselves, so the problem of metastatic awakening is critical to understand.

Over the last years, we've discovered that the mechanism that triggers this awakening, at least in the experimental models that we have studied, comes from inflammation in the normal tissue surrounding embedded cancer cells. Once inflammation occurs, cells in the tissue stimulate the cancer cells to shift from a dormant, non-proliferating state into an actively proliferating stem-cell-like state that enables them to spawn life-threatening metastases. Based on these observations, we think that we have a very good model for the long mysterious question of how metastatic awakening is actually triggered.