European Surgical Centre for Metastatic Disease
The European Surgical Centre for Metastatic Disease forms an important part of the Charité Comprehensive Cancer Centre and brings together specialists of different medical professions, clinicians and scientists to facilitate clinical efforts on the diagnosis, treatment and management of patients with metastatic tumor disease.
Cancer may occur in different parts of the body and spreads by growing into the surrounding tissue. After detaching from the primary tumor, cancer cells can travel through the body by entering the blood stream or the lymphatic system and may spread beyond the primary tumor location into different parts of the body. This situation is known as metastatic disease. Not all cancers spread, but when cancer does spread it commonly metastasizes in vital organs such as the liver, the lungs, the bones, brain, the peritoneum and lymph nodes. Beyond that, some types of cancer follow certain transmission routes and affect a particular organ or tissue more commonly than others. Occasionally, an early dissemination of metastasis occurs in vital organs without the detection of a primary tumor after clinical examination — the so called CUP (cancer of unknown primary) syndrome.
However, over the last decade potent multidisciplinary therapeutic strategies have been developed concerning the deceleration or reduction of tumor growth, with the aim to overcome tumor related complications — even though a total elimination of tumor tissue might be unlikely. Treatment is based on the type of cancer and may comprise different approaches including surgery, intravenous chemotherapy, radiation therapy or the use of biologic substances to offer a tumor-specific targeted therapy.
In order to offer the best possible patient management, the European Surgical Centre for Metastatic Disease is part of the Charité Comprehensive Cancer Center that brings together clinicians from various areas of expertise and facilitates their synergies.
Metastasis is a problem of major medical importance and has important implication on cancer treatment. By providing information of metastatic disease, we want to encourage patients to get in touch with our experts in order to facilitate a fast diagnostic workup in case of unclear tumor disease. Further we aim to transfer novel therapeutic concepts to clinical practice in order to offer our patients promising new treatments.
