Conventional wisdom says that if you put a good kid in a bad school full of troublemakers, the chances are they’ll make mischief. Put a bad kid in a school of little angels, and they’ll be more likely to toe the line and behave. Before you start thinking that this has become a child psychology blog, rest assured that it’s actually a metaphor for cancer.
For years, researchers have been investigating the ‘tumour microenvironment’ – the cells, signals and biological cues that immediately surround cancer cells. These can have a powerful impact on tumours, either encouraging them to grow aggressively – the good kid gone bad – or keeping them under control, like the reformed ruffian.
This is particularly important for metastasis – the process by which cancer spreads. Cells break away from the original (primary) tumour and travel through the bloodstream, setting up home elsewhere in the body to form secondary cancers. It’s usually these secondary cancers that actually end up being a major problem, and often lead to death as they are difficult to treat effectively.
To continue the analogy, if the travelling cells settle in a ‘good school’, they might never grow into tumours. But if they end up in a bad microenvironment, then trouble can start.
Now Robert Weinberg and his team at MIT have made a discovery that adds an extra twist to this situation – primary cancers can send signals around the body, ‘activating’ the growth of secondary tumours at a distance. Their results are published in this week’s edition of the journal Cell.
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