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Exploiting the Inherent Metastasis of Leukemia to Improve Chemotherapeutic Approaches

Matthew Trendowski

Nearly all cancers are linked by the inexorable phenotype of metastasis as malignant growths have the capability to spread from their place of origin to distant sites throughout the body. While different cancers may have various propensities to migrate towards specific locations, they are all linked by this unifying principal. Unlike most neoplasms, leukemia has inherent cell motility as leukocytes are required to move throughout the vascular system, suggesting that no mutations are required for anchorage independent growth. As such, it seems likely that leukemias are inherently metastatic, endowed with cancer’s deadliest phenotype simply due to cell of origin. This article presents the biology of metastasis development and how leukemia cells are inherently provided this devastating phenotype. It is then elucidated how clinicians may be able to exploit the motility of leukemia and metastatic emboli of other cancer types through an approach known as Sonodynamic Therapy (SDT), a treatment modality that combines chemotherapeutic agents with ultrasonic irradiation to preferentially damage malignant cells. As experimental evidence has indicated, SDT is a promising therapeutic approach in need of clinical testing for further validation.