Stress proteins and pancreatic cancer metastasis.

Tumor metastasis is challenged by its resistance to microenvironmental stress infringed during escape from the primary tumor and the colonization of a foreign secondary tissue. Because of its great metastatic potential and its strong resistance to anticancer drugs, pancreatic cancer is regarded as a paradigm of the adaptation of cancer cells to microenvironmental stress. Thus, to understand how pancreatic cancer cells adapt to the different endogenous and therapy-related stresses is crucial for understanding their etiology and for the development of new efficient anticancer strategies. This review summarizes the multiple functions accomplished by one major factor of pancreatic cancer cell stress response, the stress protein p8.