A New Mechanism Involved in Early Melanoma Metastasis

Source: Technology Network, November 2021

“We must not only look inside the tumour but also outside of it,” says Héctor Peinado, a researcher at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO). How tumours manipulate their environment to advance is one of the big questions that Peinado has been trying to answer for years. For decades “to fight tumours, researchers focused on studying their intrinsic behaviour, but not on their surroundings.”

Peinado is the head of the CNIO’s Microenvironment & Metastasis Group, which studies the mechanisms involved in metastatic progression, including how nanoparticles called exosomes, which are released by tumours, manipulate the tumour microenvironment to favour metastasis. A paper published this week in the prestigious journal Nature Cancer describes how this critical process for melanoma progression occurs: exosomes travel and home to the sentinel lymph node -the lymph node where metastasis initially occurs- from where they remotely prepare a favourable environment -the pre-metastatic niche- for metastasis. In this study, they observed that the NGFR molecule drives this entire process and that blocking it drastically reduces metastasis in animal models. The reduction in metastasis was achieved using THX-B; this molecule is being tested for the treatment of other pathologies, which will accelerate its possible use in the treatment of tumours.

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