Catching cancer in the act of metastasis

Good news! This could be a breakthrough!  Cancer is history!

"... The exact moment of metastasis is fleeting, lost in the millions of divisions that take place in a tumor. “These events are typically impossible to monitor in real time,” ...
Now, researchers led by Weissman, who is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, have turned a CRISPR tool into a way to do just that. ..."

"Detailed phylogenies of tumor populations can recount the history and chronology of critical events during cancer progression, such as metastatic dissemination. We applied a Cas9-based, single-cell lineage tracer to study the rates, routes, and drivers of metastasis in a lung cancer xenograft mouse model. We report deeply resolved phylogenies for tens of thousands of cancer cells traced over months of growth and dissemination. ...

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Catching cancer in the act | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Using CRISPR technology, researchers are tracking the lineage of individual cancer cells as they proliferate and metastasize in real-time.

Here is the underlying research paper:

Single-cell lineages reveal the rates, routes, and drivers of metastasis in cancer xenografts