Scientists funded by Cancer Research UK have announced a ‘breakthrough’ in understanding how cancer cells spread around the body, changing current ways of thinking about cancer metastasis and potentially leading to better treatments.
The team, based at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, University of Cambridge, found that cancer cells ‘exploit’ the body’s tissue repair process to spread cells around the body.
By blocking the activity of NALCN in cells in mice with cancer triggers metastasis, the team found. NALCN is a protein involved in regulating both tissue repair and metastasis.
The research, which was published in Nature Genetics, also found that this process is not only restricted to cancer. When the team removed NALCN from mice without cancer, this caused their healthy cells to leave their original tissue and travel around the body where they joined other organs.
This suggests that metastasis is not an abnormal process limited to cancer as previously thought, but is a normal process used by healthy cells that has been hijacked by cancers to migrate to other parts of the body to generate metastases.
Professor Richard Gilbertson, director of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre and group leader for the study said the findings are “among the most important” to have come from his lab for three decades.
“If validated through further research, this could have far-reaching implications on how we prevent cancer from spreading and allow us to manipulate this process to repair damaged organs,” Gilbertson said.
Metastasis has remained incredibly hard to prevent, despite being one of the main causes of death in cancer patients, largely due to the difficulty in identifying key drivers of this process that could be targeted by drugs.
Now that the role of NALCN in metastasis has been identified, the team is looking into various ways to restore its function, including using existing drugs on the market.
Dr Eric Rahrmann, lead researcher on the study and senior research associate at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, said: “We are incredibly excited to have identified a single protein that regulates not only how cancer spreads through the body, independent of tumour growth, but also normal tissue cell shedding and repair.
“We are developing a clearer picture on the processes that govern how cancer cells spread. We can now consider whether [it is] likely there are existing drugs that could be repurposed to prevent this mechanism from triggering cancer spreading in patients.”