Can Immunopathology Explain Why Metastasizing Lung Cancer Cells Manifest Ubiquity in the Blood Stream but Selectivity in Lymph Node Colonization?

Abstract

It has been calculated that metastasizing lung cancers are numbered in millions. It has also been argued that lymph nodes occupy the status of organs in cancer metastasis. Accordingly, both the tissues now generally regarded as organs as well as lymph nodes, which are of that same status, should all be haphazardly showered by circulating cancer cells. On the contrary, these two sets of organs exhibit very conspicuous diversity in their colonization patterns. Thus, the better known organs generally exhibit scattered secondaries all over the body while the lymph nodes are selectively affected. Thus, in the words of Willis, a foremost cancer authority, lung cancers “often” exhibit discrete deposits in the abdominal lymph nodes, “these diminishing in centrifugal order.” Indeed, such an order is not known as regards, say, the liver, adrenal gland, kidney and ovaries. Therefore, is Nature showing signals which ought to be decoded? Here, I argue that this is possible. Moreover, the welcome expectation is that such a study of lung cancer can usher in an immunological breakthrough which may point to target therapy and thereby conduce to cancer cure.