Name: Understanding Cancer Metastasis
Rating: 5 (6 reviews)

Overview

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Over 500,000 people in the United States and over 8 million people worldwide are dying from cancer every year. As people live longer, the incidence of cancer is rising worldwide, and the disease is expected to strike over 20 million people annually by 2030.
Everyone has been, or will be touched by cancer in some way during their lifetime. Thanks to years of dedication and commitment to research we’ve made enormous advances in the prevention and treatment of cancer, But there is still a lot of work to be done.
In this course, physicians and scientists at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine explain how cancer spreads or metastasizes. We’ll describe the major theories of metastasis and then describe the biology behind the steps in metastasis. The course also describes the major organs targeted by metastasis and describes how metastases harm the patient.

Syllabus

History and Overview of Metastasis

In this first module, we'll concentrate on the history and overview of metastasis and give you a flavor of how cancer is defined as well as some of the history surrounding how we began to understand metastasis.

Primary Tumor Growth and Neoangiogenesis

In this module, we'll focus on uncontrolled cell division, which is a defining property of cancer, as well as mutation and neoangiogenesis and their roles in tumor formation. We'll also take a look at a primary tumor microenvironment and its component cell types.

EMT / Invasion / Intravasation

During this module, we'll turn our attention to the next steps after the initial primary tumor formation, epithelial to mesenchymal transition of cancer cells, and local tumor invasion and intravasation into blood or lymph vessels.

Survival in the Circulation and Extravasation

We'll now take a close look at cancer survival within the circulation, the role of the circulatory system in metastasis, the genetic determinants of metastatic potential, signalling mechanisms, chemokines, the dock and lock hypothesis, and extravasation.

Dormancy and Secondary Tumor Growth

In this module, we'll focus on dormancy and secondary tumor growth and how they contribute to the lethality of cancer.

Morbidity and Mortality Associated with Metastasis

In the previous modules, we've looked closely at the sequential steps of metastasis and some of the biology of how metastasis occurs. Now, we'll turn our attention to morbidity and mortality, or in other words, how cancer hurts and kills people.

Taught by

Kenneth Valkenburg, Jelani Zarif, Haley Axelrod, Sarah Amend and Kenneth J. Pienta

Charts

#3 in Subjects / Disease & Disorders / Cancer

Reviews

5.0 rating, based on 6 Class Central reviews

4.9 rating at Coursera based on 2219 ratings

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Aedrian Abrilla @aaabrilla

This course is a nice distillation of the current concepts regarding cancer metastasis - a phenomenon that is, more often than not, a death sentence that modern medicine can still only delay but not overturn. While I think that cancer researchers and care practitioners will find little practical value from the material, casual learners, college students and beginning graduate students will appreciate the introductory content.
Sonal P Patel @sonal

This is a very important, informative, and excellent class, taught by researchers in the field. Now I understand Metastasis better than when I started taking this class. I got a better understanding of cancer and how it spreads to different sites in...

This is a very important, informative, and excellent class, taught by researchers in the field. Now I understand Metastasis better than when I started taking this class.

I got a better understanding of cancer and how it spreads to different sites in the human body. I understand how the survival of cancer cells in circulation is the key to metastatic spread. Now I also understand the lymphatic system and its role in the metastasis of cancer.

The final lecture on morbidity and mortality was also very educational and informative to understand the quality of life for patients suffering from metastatic cancer.

How different proteins and genes help or hurt the progress of cancer cells to different organs, and how much is still not understood --- all these topics covered are very educational. Hope I can also contribute to the advancement of research in this field.
Yossie Mousalli @mousalli

I am very interested in understanding the protein dialogue between Cancer cells and DNA triggers.

There are new investigations in the last two years trying to explain why cells cannot recognize Cancer cells based on this interaction
Kaltun Farah

Kaltun Farah is taking this course right now, spending 3 hours a week on it and found the course difficulty to be medium.

this course is understandable not very hard but i really enjoyed when i was reading
its so clear and east
so i will try to understand more and more
Riana Muhammad

Riana Muhammad completed this course.
Mak Shiu Kwong Thomas

Mak Shiu Kwong Thomas completed this course.

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