Unwanted Delivery

Much like we head to the Post Office and send a parcel to a friend, cells can send precious cargo between themselves too. These informational sacs called extracellular vesicles (EVs) are important in healthy bodies, but also play a role in disease. Now researchers have shown that EVs released by tumour cells could be another way by which cancers spread. The team showed that EVs shed by tumour cells contain DNA (green) and an enzyme called cGAS (red) known to be crucial for tumour progression. They also demonstrated that EVs from tumour cells and their cargo are transferred to recipient cells. Adding EVs containing the DNA sequence of a specific gene not normally found in mammary cells, to mammary cells growing in a dish, resulted in that ‘foreign’ gene being expressed. Understanding how cancer cells package and send precious cargo could be used to detect cancer sooner or provide new therapeutics in the future.

Written by Sophie Arthur

Sophie Arthur

former Science Communications Officer MRC LMS

Formerly a stem cell biologist, Sophie has since moved into science communication working at the MRC LMS. She also writes an award winning science and education blog Soph talks science.

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• Image from work by James W. Clancy and colleagues
• Department of Biological Sciences, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Published in Cell Reports, March 2022