Journal of the National Cancer Institute Advance Access originally published online on September 9, 2008
JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute 2008 100(18):1279-1281; doi:10.1093/jnci/djn336
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© Oxford University Press 2008.
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Cell Fusion Theory: Can It Explain What Triggers Metastasis?
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In 1992, John Pawelek, Ph.D., was working with melanoma cells when he read an article that asked whether the fusion of cancer cells and white blood cells could lead to metastasis. Intrigued, he found that his cells fused easily to white blood cells called macrophages and that these hybrids resembled metastatic melanoma cells.
"Since then, I havent looked back," said Pawelek, a senior research scientist at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., whose primary research focus is now the cell fusion theory of metastasis. In a May 2008 article in Nature Reviews Cancer, Pawelek and Ashok K. Chakraborty, Ph.D., also at Yale, lay out the case for the theory, which could explain one of the mysteries of metastasis: What is the