Science and Technology Daily Beijing, December 14 (intern reporter Zhang Jiaxin) cancer cells will "sleep" after leaving the primary tumor to avoid immune and drug treatment, but when they "wake up", they will spread to different tissues of the body and recur, forming metastatic cancer. How cancer cells remain dormant for years and why they "wake up" has been a major mystery in cancer research. Recently, researchers at the Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine in Mount Sinai in the United States have solved this key problem.
According to the results of the study published in the journal Nature Cancer on the 13th, cancer cells maintain "sleep" by secreting type III collagen in their surrounding environment, and when collagen levels gradually decline, cancer cells will "wake up". The researchers found that by enriching the environment around cancer cells with this collagen, they could force the cancer cells to remain dormant, preventing tumors from recurring.
Cancer patients die mostly due to metastasis of cancer cells, which are likely to occur several years after tumor removal. Previously, scientists have studied how spreading tumor cells end their dormant state; this new work shows how cancer cells remain dormant.
The study used high-resolution imaging techniques, including in vivo two-photon microscopy. The technology can visualize dormant cancer cells in living animals in real time, allowing researchers to track dormant cancer cells in mouse models using breast and head and neck cancer cell lines, and to visualize changes in extracellular matrix structure when cancer cells "dormant" and how they change when they "wake up."
In patient samples, the researchers showed that collagen abundance can serve as a potential indicator of tumor recurrence and metastasis. In the mouse model, when the scientists increased the amount of type III collagen around the cancer cells that left the tumor, the progression of the cancer was interrupted and the disseminated cells were forced into a dormant state. This suggests that cancer cells can be prevented from metastasis by adjusting their dormant state.
Senior author Dr. Joseph Javier Bravo-Cordero, associate professor of medicine (hematology and medical oncology) at the Tisch Cancer Institute, said the findings have potential clinical implications and could lead to the study of a new biomarker to predict tumor recurrence, as well as therapeutic interventions to reduce local and distal recurrence. This intervention, designed to prevent dormant cancer cells from "waking up," is a therapeutic strategy to prevent their metastatic growth. With the further discovery of tumor dormant biology and the development of new specific drugs, the treatment of inducing cancer cell dormancy is combined with the treatment specifically targeting dormant cancer cells, which will eventually prevent the local recurrence and metastasis of cancer cells, paving the way for cancer relief.
Source: Science and Technology Daily
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