Disrupted Journey

It can be hard to adapt when you move to a new place. Luckily, the same is true for cancer cells trying to migrate from one organ to another – a process called metastasis. Most bowel cancer cells that try to set up a second home in the liver die in the process, but a few particularly hardy ones can manage it, and create a dangerous secondary tumour. To study this, and learn how to prevent it, researchers introduced human tumour cells into a mouse liver (pictured). They discovered that cells capable of spreading had particularly high levels of a protein, PCK1, which helps build nucleotides – components of DNA. When the tumours were treated with a drug that blocks nucleotide formation, usually used for arthritis patients, they were no longer able to metastasise, raising hopes that it, and other similar drugs, might help stop bowel cancer in its tracks.

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 Norihiro Yamaguchi, Ethan M Weinberg and Alexander Nguyen, and colleagues
• Laboratory of Systems Cancer Biology, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, December 2019