 When breast cancer becomes a problem for patients, it's when it spreads through the body and goes to different organs. What the microtentacles on the tumor cell do is allow the tumor cell that's flowing through the bloodstream to actually reattach in the distant tissue and become a metastatic tumor. And so that is the process that we're trying to stop by the time we first detect tumors in patients with advanced technologies like MRI. That tumor is already 100 million tumor cells, so very large. So we need to be detecting cancer earlier and we also need to find ways to stop it from spreading. And we can do that by either identifying that some of the drugs that we already have are able to stop metastasis if we use them in different ways, or we can identify completely new drugs that will stop cancer from spreading rather than just stopping it from growing. This is the Cancer Center Microscope Facility where we can watch in great detail what tumor cells do. It's almost impossible to take pictures of how cancer spreads through the blood of human patients, but we can actually use zebrafish and look at how these red tumor cells roll along blood vessel walls during the process of spreading to different tissues. We can see when they extend tentacles and actually grab on to the blood vessel wall, and that's what allows them to stick in the distant tissues and become a metastatic tumor. And the problem with trying to take pictures of a cell that's free-floating is when you are taking pictures of it, it drifts away from your picture, so it blurs and it also goes out of the frame. If you try and add drugs to the cell, you also wash it away. So we developed a technology called the tether chip that actually holds the cells in place. The tether chip technology allows us to take cells directly from patients' blood samples and test the microtentacles on those cells. So that's the direction we're moving is the ability to test which drugs would be most likely to stop metastases in that patient. But we need to begin the clinical trials. In this recent publication, we've shown that tentacles are not just specific to breast cancer. In fact, we see microtentacles in colon cancers, lung cancers, and prostate cancers, and other collaborating groups have also observed them in ovarian cancer and brain cancers. So it seems that this fundamental process of extending microtentacles may apply to many different cancers.