From breast to the brain: unraveling the puzzle of metastasis organotropism.

Metastatic colonization of different target organs is a highly selective process that depends on specialized properties of tumor cells. In a recent Nature paper, Massague and colleagues built on their earlier success in functional genomic analysis of breast cancer metastasis to bone and lung and reported the identification of breast cancer brain metastasis genes, highlighting the importance of the stromal environment in the development of organ-specific metastasis.