How cancer starts: how a normal cell turns into cancer
Metastasis: how cancer spreads, and why most cells that leave fail
A tumour can shed millions of its cells into the blood every day. Yet almost none of them grow into a new tumour. How does cancer spread at all, and why does where it lands matter so much?
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1
Back in Rono's story. Miva cut out his mole, with a small edge of normal skin around it, and sent it to a lab. Under a microscope, the lab found a melanoma, and a thin one.
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Thin matters. The top layer of the skin has no blood vessels: they lie deeper down. The deeper a melanoma grows, the closer it gets to them, the roads out. Rono's had only just reached below the top layer.
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