title: Metastatic cells will take any help they can get.
abstract: Two recent papers in Cancer Cell (Lu et al., this issue of Cancer Cell, and Kang et al.) illustrate means whereby acquisition of VCAM-1 by tumor cells can promote metastasis. First, monocyte/macrophages expressing α4 integrin bind VCAM-1 and provide survival signals enhancing establishment of metastases. Second, VCAM-1 allows dormant tumor cells to interact with osteoclasts, yielding paracrine signals and enhancing osteolytic metastatic growth.
authors.affiliation: Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Richard O
authors.initials: RO
authors.lastname: Hynes