Studying metastasis is one of the primary focuses of our lab. When a new student steps into this field, most likely they will start their literature search from the past decade, or even worse, by focusing only on what has been published in the past five years. Yet, more than 100 years of collective wisdom in metastasis research are worth researchers in the field—new and old—revisiting.
I pulled this classic review paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrc1098) from my graduate school reference collection. It is an influential article dating back to 2003. It is authored by a giant in metastasis research, Isaiah (Josh) J. Fidler, whom I was lucky enough to know and meet later during my time at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center as a postdoc. While this review, at the time it was written, does not contain any "fancy" modern terms like cancer stem cell, dormancy, plasticity, cancer metabolism, immunotherapy, single-cell sequencing, etc., the profound complexity of the biology of tumor metastasis depicted in this review still inspires me and drives my research questions daily. We have to remember what the field has been in the past before embarking on any new exploration. As the old saying reminds us: “Study the past if you would define the future.” – Confucius
Happy reading! I bet you will enjoy it.