Cancers Hijack Body’s Defences To Grow And Spread
Cancer Research UK scientists have discovered how two genes can ‘hijack’ control of part of the body’s defences against cancer, helping them grow and spread. Their research was published in Developmental Cell(1) yesterday (Tuesday).
Part of the body’s defence system is controlled by a gene called Tumour Necrosis Factor (TNF) that can stop cancers from developing by killing them. But this same response has also been shown to help promote the growth of cancers.
For the first time, scientists at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute in Glasgow have shown how TNF turns to the ‘dark side’, helping some cancers to grow and move to new parts of the body. They found that the TNF response is hijacked by two genes linked to cancer.
The two genes are a tumour suppressor gene, that promotes tumour growth when deleted, and a tumour promoter gene that can turn cells cancerous when activated.
In their study, using fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), they found that cells which lack a tumour suppressor gene and turn cancerous are targeted and killed by the TNF controlled response. But, if the tumour promoter is also activated, cancer cells are not only able to escape the TNF’s death signal but also produce a signal to help them spread and grow. Read more
Magnetic Nanoparticles Show Promise For Combating Human Cancer
Scientists at Georgia Tech and the Ovarian Cancer Institute have further developed a potential new treatment against cancer that uses magnetic nanoparticles to attach to cancer cells, removing them from the body. The treatment, tested in mice in 2008, has now been tested using samples from human cancer patients. The results appear online in the journal Nanomedicine.
“We are primarily interested in developing an effective method to reduce the spread of ovarian cancer cells to other organs ,” said John McDonald, professor at the the School of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and chief research scientist at the Ovarian Cancer Institute.
The idea came to the research team from the work of Ken Scarberry, then a Ph.D. student at Tech. Scarberry originally conceived of the idea as a means of extracting viruses and virally infected cells. At his advisor’s suggestion Scarberry began looking at how the system could work with cancer cells.
He published his first paper on the subject in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in July 2008. In that paper he and McDonald showed that by giving the cancer cells of the mice a fluorescent green tag and staining the magnetic nanoparticles red, they were able to apply a magnet and move the green cancer cells to the abdominal region. Read more