PRSB: What's new! Cancer cells may be able to spread more efficiently to their surroundings!

4, 2020 // -- In a recent study published in the international journal Proceedings of The Royal Society B, scientists from the University of Reading and other institutions found that cancer cells can spread by turning on or off the ability to perceive their surroundings, move, hide and grow new tumors.
sensitivity to the surrounding environment is a key ability to make a small number of cancer cells spread better than other cancer cells in the tumor. In the
article, researchers developed a new method that combines evolutionary biology with artificial intelligence to study the movement and shape of cancer cells in more detail than ever before, explaining why some cancer cells can move more easily to other parts of the body and create new tumor tissue.
researchers say some cells are able to show a clear sense and ability to react to their surroundings, which researchers previously thought was missing from cancer, meaning that cancer cells can better multiply in other parts of the body by adjusting their shape to more effectively bypass barriers such as vascular walls or other competing cells.
picture Source: Dr. Cecil Fox, National Cancer Institute The results of this paper may help explain why some cancers are more aggressive than others, and in the future could help clinicians target these supercells and develop new anti-cancer therapies to improve the quality of life for cancer patients.
Unlike human health cells, cancer cells are thought to lose their ability to perceive things around them early in their progression, meaning they are better able to "blindfold" and focus on replicating and forming primary tumors, and for the first time in this paper, researchers have observed that some cancer cells can actually re-open that awareness and remove "eye masks" to effectively move to other parts of the body for proliferation.
These more space-conscious cells change shape when they encounter an object with a barrier, which makes them cross other cells, pass through the cell membrane and enter the bloodstream, reaching other parts of the body, where they continue to proliferate to form new tumors.
, the researchers first asked breast cancer samples to evolve a collection of cancers with enhanced motor or implant properties through a natural selection process.
Some of these cells are placed in "barrier training ground", mimicking the body's movement patterns, while the most successful cells are divided into groups that carry strong motor characteristics, while others are allowed to grow in the lung tissue of rats and form a group of strong immigrant cells, just as tumors form.
Comparing the two groups of cells with control group cells, the scientists were able to analyze the differences in detail to see what values made some of them move better than others, and then used computer programs to observe cell behavior in petri dishes and to analyze the shape and movement of cells more quickly.
researchers say the tightly-knit group of mobile cells can quickly change shape to avoid adjacent cells, while in sparse environments they change cells less frequently, suggesting that these cells can increase or decrease their spatial awareness based on their surroundings, making them more efficient in all environments.
researchers say the new computer vision methods we have developed could be used in many other situations, such as measuring the formation of blood clots or tracking the movement patterns of sperm cells.
() Original source: George Butler, Shirley J. Keeton, Louise J. Johnson, et al. A phenotypic switch in the dispersal strategy of breast cancer cells selected for metastatic colonisation, Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2020), doi:10.1098/rspb.2020.2523。