Breast and prostate cancers have a great propensity to metastasize to long bones. The development of bone metastases is life-threatening, incurable, and drastically reduces patients' quality of life. The chemokines CCL2 and CXCL12 and their respective receptors, CCR2 and CXCR4, are central instigators involved in all stages leading to cancer cell dissemination and secondary tumor formation in distant target organs. They orchestrate tumor cell survival, growth and migration, tumor invasion and angiogenesis, and the formation of micrometastases in the bone marrow. The bone niche is of particular importance in metastasis formation, as it expresses high levels of CCL2 and CXCL12, which attract tumor cells and contribute to malignancy. The limited number of available effective treatment strategies highlights the need to better understand the pathophysiology of bone metastases and reduce the skeletal tumor burden in patients diagnosed with metastatic bone disease. This review focuses on the involvement of the CCL2/CCR2 and CXCL12/CXCR4 chemokine axes in the formation and development of bone metastases, as well as on therapeutic perspectives aimed at targeting these chemokine-receptor pairs.
Keywords: Bone metastases; Breast cancer; Chemokines; Macrophages; Prostate cancer; Tumor microenvironment.