New clue discovered for how and why cancer cells spread
Gillian Rutherford - 05 December 2022
Oncology researcher John Lewis and his team contributed world-leading expertise in cancer cell imaging to an international study that sheds new light on how cancer is able to spread throughout the body.
An international team of researchers has uncovered a new mechanism that enables cancer cells to move throughout the body, providing a potential new target to stop metastasis, which is responsible for 90 per cent of cancer deaths.
In findings published in Nature, the team identifies that cancer cells move faster when they are surrounded by thicker fluids, a change that occurs when lymph drainage is compromised by a primary tumour.
“This is really the first time that the viscosity of the extracellular fluid has been looked at in detail,” says John D. Lewis, professor and Bird Dogs Chair in Translational Oncology at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry.
“Now that we know that fluid viscosity signals cancer cells to move in a specific way, we can potentially use drugs to basically short-circuit that signalling pathway and encourage cancer cells to slow down, or even maybe to stop.”