Suspicious Packages

In the body, cells can communicate via gradual chemical signalling over time, or by packaging messages up into discrete bundles called vesicles – sometimes it’s useful to receive news in a conveniently packaged burst. Cancer cells can produce vesicles too, like the dividing skin cancer cells pictured firing out packages of fake news to corrupt and mislead surrounding cells. How these packages of propaganda impact other cells isn’t fully understood, so a new research study set out to investigate. They discovered that the vesicle contents interfere with the hedgehog signalling pathway – a common string of interactions crucial from early development, and throughout adulthood. The vesicles nudge the pathway to instigate uncontrolled growth and spread – hallmarks of cancer. However, just as cancer can co-opt vesicles, so can researchers, so there’s a chance we could use the system to step in and set the hedgehog pathway back on track.

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 by Kirsi Rilla
• Institute of Biomedicine, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences, December 2019