Cutting Off Cancer

Cancer cells don’t do their dirty work alone. They get help. The growth of many tumours depends on their interactions with healthy cells in the surrounding environment, but how they exchange signals and material with them is not well understood. One way cells can communicate with each other is by forming temporary connections along thin protrusions called cytonemes. Could tumours hijack this trick for themselves? To investigate, researchers studied tumours in fruit flies (green in the wing section pictured, with normal muscle cells in red) and found that cytonemes (close up on the right) connecting them to surrounding tissues are essential for tumour growth. Crucially, inhibiting the growth and activity of these cytonemes cured the flies of otherwise lethal tumours, raising hopes that this could provide a new way to cut cancer off from its support network, and eventually lead to new treatments for people with cancer.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Sol Fereres and colleagues
• Cardiovascular Research Institute, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Genetics, September 2019