Bone metastasis is common across cancer types, but what’s happening at the cellular level inside those lesions has been hard to map. This dataset uses single-cell sequencing across several cancer types to identify three ecosystem patterns, each shaped by distinct immune and bone-related cell populations. The patterns aren’t evenly distributed; breast cancer metastases tend toward osteoclast-driven ecosystems, kidney cancer toward immune suppression, and some types show multiple strategies. The broader finding is how often different cancers converge on similar configurations once they reach bone, which has implications for how we think about shared mechanisms of colonization and persistence.
