It sounds counterintuitive not to encourage cell death as this means you’re not attacking the tumour itself.
- Eugenia Piddini
The idea that different populations of cells compete within the body, with winners and losers, was discovered in the 1970s and is thought to be a ‘quality control’ mechanism to rid the tissue of damaged or poorly-performing cells. With the discovery that genes involved in cancer promote this process, scientists have speculated that so-called ‘cell competition’ might explain how tumours grow within our tissues.
Now, researchers at the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, have used fruit flies genetically manipulated to develop intestinal tumours to show for the first time that as the tumour grows and its cells proliferate, it kills off surrounding healthy cells, making space in which to grow. The results of the study, funded by Cancer Research UK, are published in the journal Current Biology.
Read the full story
Image: Attack of the Crab Monsters (cropped)
Credit: davidd
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
__________________________________________