Vessels and Vesicles

Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) is a type of blood cancer characterised by excessive production of abnormal white blood cells. The disease causes wide-spread inflammation and is especially damaging to blood vessels within the bone marrow where the leukaemic cells are produced. The video shows skull bone vasculature (green) of a healthy mouse and a mouse with AML (leukaemic cells coloured red) in which the vessels have been ravaged by the disease. Researchers have discovered that, as this vessel damage increases, so too does the circulating level of extracellular vesicles – small membranous packages derived from cells. Extracellular vesicles are produced from healthy vascular cells as a form of cell-to-cell communication. But, when the cells are stressed (as in the case of AML) vesicle production ramps up dramatically. Monitoring vesicle levels could therefore be used to assess the extent of vessel damage in AML and the success of a given treatment.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Video from work by Georgia K. Atkin-Smith and colleagues
• Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, October 2024