Tumour Microenvironment and Metastasis

In recent years, cancer is more and more severe harm to the health of people in the world. Although tumour diagnosis and therapy have made some progresses, there is little improvement in overall. One of the main reasons is that the pathogenesis of cancer metastasis is still enigmatic. Cancer development and metastasis are a complicated process that depends on the antigenic properties of cancer cells and a favoured environment in organs. Cancer cells metastasis causes more than 90% cancer death in the lungs, liver, brain, and bone, and a primary tumour causes less than 10% death. Therefore, understanding the process of cancer metastasis is essential, and it is convenient to deal with the problem of cancer metastasis and reduce cancer-related thrombosis. It has shown that tumour microenvironment plays a significant role in cancer progression. A variety of carcinoma-associated fibroblasts, and tumour-related macrophages play expanding and critical functions in sustaining cell proliferation, evading growth suppressors, promoting survival, activating invasion and metastasis, and reprogramming energy metabolism, but the purpose of each constituent remains unknown. This chapter will focus on discussing the role of the microenvironment on tumour invasion and metastasis to improve molecular diagnostics and therapeutics.