Suppressing Cancer Signals

Cells lining the lungs are continuously replaced to fix the damage caused by inhaled particles or pathogens. Replication of basal stem cells (stained green here) provides the source of these replacement cells, but sometimes the process gets out of control – as in the lung cancer specimen shown on the right. Healthy lung tissue, by contrast, is on the left. Studies of lung tissue from healthy people, those with premalignant cancer lesions and those with squamous lung cancer have uncovered a common signalling pathway that's ramped up in patient cells compared with controls. And, researchers have shown that if these signals are experimentally increased in healthy mouse lungs, excessive basal cell proliferation occurs – just like in cancer. Importantly, a recent screen of drug compounds has identified a candidate that can inhibit this signalling pathway in lab-grown human lung cells and prevent their proliferation, offering hope for compound’s clinical development.

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 C. Aros and colleagues, Broad Stem Cell Research Center
• UCLA Medical Scientist Training Program, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Cell Reports, February 2020