Intraosseous inoculation of tumor cells into bone marrow promotes distant metastatic tumor development: A novel tool for mechanistic and therapeutic studies

Bone marrow-derived cells have a potent impact on the formation and progression of tumor metastasis. This study demonstrates that bone marrow directly promotes metastasis to distant sites from tumor cells residing in the bone marrow in multiple types of tumors and multiple mouse strains. The bone marrow environment requires less tumor cells for inducing distant metastasis and overcomes the inhibition of metastasis resulting from engineering the tumor cells with reporter genes. This discovery provides an effective approach to generate spontaneous-like metastatic tumor models which will satisfy the urgent need for studying metastasis biology and discovering novel therapeutics.

► Inoculating tumor cells into the bone marrow of syngeneic mice promotes distant metastasis.
► The bone marrow environment can recapitulate the lost metastatic potential of tumor cells transfected with reporter plasmids.
► The bone marrow directly promotes development of spontaneous metastasis.
► Intraosseous inoculation of tumor cells is a unique route for establishing spontaneous-like metastatic models.