Cancer metastasis: Cell polarity matters

Source: Science Daily, March 2018

Not only the number of migrating cancer cells determines the risk for metastasis but also their characteristics, scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) have now reported in Nature Communications. For circulating cancer cells to be able to invade tissues and settle at other sites in the body, they have to exhibit a specific polarity. This discovery might in future help to better predict individual risk for metastasis and find appropriate therapies that can reduce it.
Metastatic tumors, the dreaded “daughter tumors," form when cancer cells break away from a tumor and migrate via the lymph and the bloodstream in order to finally settle at some distant site in the body. However, the quantity of circulating cancer cells in the body is not the only factor that determines a patient’s risk of developing metastatic sites. “Some patients display high quantities of circulating tumor cells and have no or only a few metastatic sites while in others who suffer from many metastases, hardly any migrating tumor cells can be found," said Mathias Heikenwälder from the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) in Heidelberg.
The team led by Heikenwälder has therefore taken a closer look at the properties of migrating cancer cells. In human cancer cells as well as in patients with different types of cancer, and also in mice, they observed that a portion of the circulating cancer cells exhibit a specific polarity. “Under the microscope, this looks as if the cells had a kind of nose," Heikenwälder described. Two cytoskeletal proteins called ezrin and merlin play a key role in the formation of this nose. Furthermore, the scientists also found that the number of freely circulating tumor cells exhibiting this special polarity correlates with the risk of developing metastasis, both in human tumor cell lines and in mice.

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