Images of cancer cells in motion help in search for treatment

DRAMATIC images showing how cancer cells move around the body are helping scientists to investigate new ways of stopping the disease spreading and becoming more deadly.

When cancer spreads from its original location to other areas, the chances of a patient being successfully treated reduce significantly.

But how cancer cells manage to do this has previously proved difficult to study.

Now scientists, presenting their research at an international conference in Glasgow, have been able to study the movement of these cells in the lab, giving clues to treatments that could halt their spread.

Dr Erik Sahai, from Cancer Research UK, said studying how cancer spreads was vital, as this was what usually proved fatal for those with the disease.

"The thing that kills most cancer patients is the spread of the cancer from where it first arises to other parts of the body," he said.

"When that happens it gets much harder for surgeons to treat, because, while they can cut one tumour out, when it spreads to multiple sites around the body it becomes much more of a problem."

Dr Sahai said tracking the movements of cancer had not been easy.

"How cancer spreads has been a difficult-to-study and mysterious process for a number of years," he said.

"Part of that is because it happens within the body, so is not easy to observe directly, and also because at a cellular level it happens fairly infrequently.

"If you think of a moderate-sized tumour of about a billion cells, from that you might only get a dozen that spread to other parts of the body. So it is a bit of a needle in a haystack that you are trying to find and understand."

The researchers used microscopic analysis to watch the breaking away of cells from the primary tumours. The images produced using this technique show cells burrowing into normal tissue and spreading into the area around them.

The scientists were able to watch the cells spread to lymphatic cells and blood vessels, and see what they did there.

Dr Sahai, who is presenting the work at the Beatson International Cancer Conference, starting tomorrow, said moving through tissue was hard work for cancer cells – and something they only appeared to be able to do by tricking other cells into helping them.

"Obviously, moving through tissue can be relatively hard work because it is a barrier to move through – a bit like going through a jungle," he said.

"That requires the ability to chop things up and the ability to move things around, just like clearing a path. What we found is that cancer cells manage to do this, but they don't do it themselves. They co-opt non-cancer cells in the tumour to do the hard work for them.

"There is this other population of cells, called fibroblasts, which normally make your connective tissue, so they are very specialised at making and breaking tissue up.

"Cancer cells almost trick these non-cancerous cells to do that job for them and then they just follow behind. It's like a snowplough that can push all the obstacles out of the way and then you can have a big trail of cars behind it."

The finding could help lead to new treatments, if scientists can find therapies which stop the cancer cells moving.

Dr Sahai said a lot of strategies to interfere with the cancer spreading were being tested.

Caught on camera – a cell advancing

THIS picture shows breast cancer cells invading artificial tissue in the lab: The red cell is the cancer cell. The cancer cell is seen burrowing down into the tissue.

Normally a cancer cell would be stopped by the matrix structure of the surrounding tissue. The cell would have to cross this barrier to spread, with the help of non-cancerous cells.

The cancer cell in the picture measures about a 50th of a millimetre in real life.