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. 2015 Feb 15;13:64. doi: 10.1186/s12967-015-0425-0

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© Ma et al.; licensee BioMed Central. 2015

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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A model for breast cancer liver metastasis. (i) intravasation: invasive breast cancer cell invades through the endothelium of a tumor blood vessel into circulation; (ii) circulation: breast cancer cell survives in the blood vessels without any attachment; (iii) margination: circulating breast cancer cell arrests at the site of liver by adhering to the sinusoidal endothelial cell via specific sets of adhesion molecules; (iv) extravasation: the migrated breast cancer cell invades through the endothelial wall of sinusoidal endothelial cell, migrates and finally proliferates in the liver; and (v) colonization: breast cancer cells survive and form a life-threatening focus in liver.