A nerve cell (green green) growing between a cell cell culture
Simon Gret and Gustavo Ayala
CANCER The cells stole parts that destroy energy from nerve cells to fuel their spread of remote sites, a discovery that can improve treatments against the most killed tumors.
“This is the first time showing mitochondrial exchange from nerves in cancer cells,” as Elizabeth Repasky In the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, not included in research. “It is a significant next step in the cancer neuroscience, a field exploding.”
We have already known that nerve cells, or neurons, within and surrounding boils make proteins and electric signals that help cancer and spread. “Cancers with higher nerve density are related to poorer prognosis,” as Simon Grelet At the University of South Alabama.
The first studies also show that brain cancer cells can get mitochondria – energy-rising structures – from neuronal brain cells. But don’t know whether tumor cells can get mitochondria from nervous cells, says Grelet.
To find out, he and his colleagues of genetically engineered breast cells from rats to have a red fluorescent molecule, with mitochonder marked with green pigment, in a green dish. By imitating cells, they know cancer cells steal mitochondria from nerve cells for a few hours.
“Cancer cells clear their membranes so that they can steal, sip, mitochondria from neurons,” says Grees. “It’s like a mitochondria train that passes a small structure, entering the cell cell each,” he said.
To find out if it happens to the body, researchers are injected into cancer cells in red breasts of nipples to female mice to form the boils. They also specify genetically engineered the nerves around the boils to carry green mitochondria. About a month ago, 2 percent of cancer cells in these boils earn mitochondria from neurons.
In contrast, 14 percent tumor cells spread to the brain that brings mitochondria – suggest that cancer cells have a stronger spread than nothing. Further experiments suggest that it is because the cells have stolen mitochondria are better than enduring physical and chemical weights they have experienced in blood flow.
“There are many, many obstacles for a cancer cell trying to spread,” says Repasky. “They need to go out of the initial tumor, make it through the obstacles to blood vessels, getting out of blood, get enough oxygen and nutrients on the secondary site – most of them don’t do it,” he said. “The stealing of mitochondria seems to allow cancer cells to better endure the obstacle,” he said.
To explore if it happened to people, researchers have reviewed tumor samples from eight women with breast cancer spread to remote sites within their bodies. They know tumor cells from other parts of the body have 17 percent more mitochondria, compared to patients who occur in patients, as Gres.
What else, the team examined a human-prostate sample and found that cells cells are closer to the nerves farther away. “We think it is a universal mechanism that all kinds of boils do,” says team member Gustavo Ayala At the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.
The findings suggest that blocking mitochondrial transfer can reduce the spread of the most dead tumors. “I believe it can, at least some kind of boils,” says Repasky. Ayala said researchers planned to develop drugs to do it.
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