Treatment may fuel cancer's spread: "Treating cancer with surgery, chemotherapy or radiation may sometimes cause tumors to spread and U.S. researchers said on Thursday they may have nailed down one of the causes -- a compound called TGF-beta.
Tests in mice show that using the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin or radiation both raised levels of TGF-beta, which in turn helped breast cancer tumors spread to the lung.
But using an antibody to block TGF-beta stopped the process, Dr. Carlos Arteaga and colleagues at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee reported."
