Orthopaedic and rheumatologic cancers are cancers of the bones and joints. Bone cancer typically occurs as a metastatic cancer (cancer that has spread to the bones from someplace else in the body).
Cancers that develop this way will resemble and behave like the tissue they came from—so, bone cancer that develops from lung cancer will look like and behave like lung cancer cells, even though they are in the bones. This means that treatments used to treat lung cancer would be used for a patient who had bone cancer that developed from lung cancer.
Other forms of bone cancer can develop in the cells of the bone marrow that are responsible for blood formation. This can be cancers such as: