Wither and Waste

The beautiful flower on the left and its wilted counterpart on the right are in fact fruit fly ovaries – one healthy and one shrivelled by cancer. Such withering of tissues and organs – a condition known as cachexia – is often seen in humans with cancer too and is associated with diminished odds of surviving. Physically, cachexia patients appear similar to people with anorexia, but unlike the latter, simply eating more won’t reverse the problem. In fact scientists have little idea how to undo the damage or prevent it in the first place. Thanks to a fruit fly model of the disease, however, they’ve found an important clue: a protein secreted by malignant tumours that induces the tissue wasting. Furthermore, depleting the protein from tumours made the flies better. These results could point to physiological processes driving cachexia in cancer patients, and thus could ultimately aid the development of much needed treatments.

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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• Image from work by David Bilder and Alejandra Figueroa-Clarevega
• University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Copyright held by original authors
• Research published in Developmental Cell, April 2015