Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Scientists Unlock Reasons Cancer Spreads

Posted by samzenpus on from the malignant-ambassador dept.

* * Beatles-Beatles writes "Instead of a cell just breaking off from a tumor and traveling through the bloodstream to another organ where it forms a secondary tumour, or metastasis, researchers in the United States have shown that the cancer sends out envoys to prepare the new site."

2 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. Ordinary Bone Marrow Cells vs Stem Cells by Quirk · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The article mentioned ordinary bone marrow cells, but recent reports have cited... "Bone marrow stem cells, for example, are the most primitive cells in the marrow. From them all the various types of blood cells are descended. Bone marrow stem-cell transfusions (or transplants) were originally given to replace various types of blood cells."

    "Stem cells from bone marrow can also, quite remarkably, give rise to non-marrow cells"

    Do bone marrow cells exhibit pluripotent characteristics that lend them to the use metastasis puts them to?

    --
    "Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
    Cohen
  2. Re:Use up the landing pads? by Muhammar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think much better approach is to identify these marrow-stimulating factors that are produced by tumors. Once you are able to shut off this signaling (by making therapeutic antibodies against these factors, by developing an antagonist for their receptors, etc), you won't have to mess with fibronectin (which has useful function in cell adhesion elsewhere).

    --
    I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it