"Gene scissors" mark each cancer cell with a unique mark

When cancer is limited to one part of the body, it can usually be treated by surgery or other means.
, however, most cancer-related deaths are caused by the metastasis of cancer cells throughout the body.
the exact moment of metastasis is very short, often drowning in the millions of divisions that occur in tumor cells.
events are often not monitored in real time.
new study, researchers used a mouse model of human KRAS mutant lung cancer and genetically modified cancer cells with the Cas9 protein encoded.
As cancer cells in mice continue to divide and multiply, Cas9 is continuously cut at the target DNA site, and the DNA repair mechanism of the cancer cells constantly patches these gaps, patching or removing random nucleotides to form a unique repair sequence called "insertion/deletion".
these sequences pass from generation to generation as the cells divide, becoming a unique marker for each cancer cell to carry.
this shearing and repair occurs randomly in almost every generation, allowing for a very fine map of cancer cell evolution - showing the path and direction of the spread of metastasis of cancer cells in the body.
found that although the cancer cells came from the same cell line, they metasaled in different ways after transplantation.
, the researchers believe that as the original cancer cell line splits over generations, the cancer cells appear to develop different metastasis properties.
cancer cells and all their offspring appear in only one tissue, which means they do not metasemn, while the offspring of other cancer cells appear in multiple tissues.
researchers also found that the first step in the metastasis of many cancer cells was from the lungs to the "transit hub" of lymphatic tissue, suggesting that in mouse models, this site was closely related to the spread of cancer cells into the body.
, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was involved in the study, said these "transit hubs" are important in developing cancer therapies.
if you focus on these areas, you can delay or prevent cancer metastasis in the first place," he said.
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