I have recently become interested in the dynamics of metastatic spread, and together with colleagues at Moffitt Cancer Center, I have started to work on mechanistic models that look at the impact of the topology of the vascular network (e.g. here and here). When coming into this field I was surprised by the lack of work along these lines, and found that most people were delving deep into the genome of cancer cells to find the answers of why, where and how metastases appear.
I was therefore positively surprised to hear of the work of the late Dr. Leonard Weiss, who did a lot of work on metastases throughout his long career. In his work we find the physical perspective of metastatic spread that is almost completely absent in this gene-centric era. The other day I finally received his book "Principles of Metastases" from 1985, which I still believe to be highly relevant. A review will be posted when I've finished reading it, which should be soon.
2 comments:
Excellent points Philip - was this book withdrawn from circulation? It's seems to be a trend that there were many insightful alternative views to different aspects of cancer progression per-genome that disappeared post genome!
I bought it online at abebooks, and it turned out to be an old library copy.
So far it's a really good read. Most of the cell biology is slightly out of date, but he analyses every step of the metastatic process from a physical perspective as well, which is really interesting.
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