SAN DIEGO -- The National Cancer Institute awarded a $10 million grant to an oncology consortium led by scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, it was announced Monday.

Researchers plan to use the money to study the behavior of cancer cells during metastasis, which is the spread of cancer from a primary tumor to other sites throughout the body.

"We hope this information will ultimately help clinicians determine who should be receiving aggressive treatments and who should not, as well as laying the groundwork for the development of novel therapeutic approaches," said Scripps Research professor Peter Kuhn, the study's principal investigator.

According to the American Cancer Society, about 1.5 million new cases of cancer are diagnosed in the United States each year.