Sidestepping Side Effects

Having surgery to remove a tumour, followed by chemotherapy to make sure any lingering shreds of cancer are killed, is a gruelling experience. So it’s disheartening if the cancer then spreads and grows anew, aided in part by the very treatment that was intended to shut it down. This can happen in breast cancer patients, but how chemotherapy prompts the spread, or metastasis, was unclear. Researchers have now discovered that one side-effect of the chemotherapy – connective tissue cells creating an inflammatory environment – ultimately supports remaining crumbs of cancer to spread and regrow in the lungs (mouse lung pictured with breast cancer metastases). Adding an agent to the chemotherapy which blocked the activity of proteins (red) involved in recruiting immune cells to cause inflammation led to a large reduction in cancer spreading. This approach could improve the efficacy of chemotherapy for not just breast cancer, but potentially other types as well.

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 Lea Monteran and Nour Ershaid, and colleagues
• Department of Pathology, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, October 2022