Environmental Cancer

In a healthy child, T cells (a type of white blood cell) are formed in the bone marrow and are programmed to find and fight diseases. T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (T-ALL) is a common type of childhood cancer, in which malignant T-cells that can’t perform normal functions accumulate in the bone marrow. In order to understand how T-ALL cells survive, researchers studied the environment surrounding them in the bone marrow. Non-cancerous neighbouring dendritic cells (stained green) were seen to send messages to the T cells (stained blue), creating conditions that allowed T-ALL cells to grow, spread and survive. When this interaction was eliminated, the cancer cells were unable to multiply and were not sustained. This new insight into how T-ALL interacts with its environment could lead to alternative cancer therapies.

Written by Katie Panteli

Katie Panteli

Writer

Katie, a Warwick Biomed graduate, works for a science-publishing house in London with some of the world's most respected scientific minds. She's most interested in human biology, anything and everything that makes us tick.

• Image from the University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, The University of Texas at Austin, TX, USA
• Image copyright held by original authors
• Research published in PNAS, February 2016