This TED Talk features pediatric cancer researcher Hasini Jaietylika recorded live at TEDx Mid-Atlantic 2017.

Cancer, it's a devastating disease that takes an enormous emotional toll, not only on the patient, but the patient's loved ones as well. It is a battle that the human

race has been fighting for centuries, and while we've made some advancements, we still haven't

beaten it. Two out of five people in the U.S. will develop cancer in their lifetime. Of those, 90% will

succumb to the disease due to metastases. Metastases is a spread of cancer from a primary

site to a distal site through the circulatory or the lymphatic system. For instance, a female patient with breast cancer

doesn't succumb to the disease simply because she has a mass on her breast. She succumbs her

disease because it spreads to the lungs, liver, lymph nodes, brain, bone, where it becomes unreceptible or untreatable.

Metastases is a complicated process, one that I've studied for several years now.

And something that my team and I discovered recently was that cancer cells are able to communicate

with each other and coordinate their movement

based on how closely packed they are in the tumor microenvironment.

They communicate with each other through two signaling molecules called interleukin-6 and

interleukin-8. Now, like anything else in nature,

when things get a little too tight,

the signal is enhanced,

causing the cancer cells to move away faster

from the primary site

and spread to a new site.

So if we block this signal

using a drug cocktail that we developed, we can stop the communication

between cancer cells and slow down the spread of cancer. Let me pause here for a second and take

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