Another Cancer Treament Possibility

          In a study done a few years ago, it was found that not only are cancer cells hard to read and attack because of their diverse characteristics, but also because of the environment that surrounds them. Extracellular vesicles, or EVs, were discovered to be one of the many extracellular components that affect the cells behavior over all. EVs are essentially vesicles that contain proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids and are released by tumor cells and taken in by less malignant tumor cells. These extracellular vesicles specifically contain mRNAs that are “involved in migration and metastasis”, which alters the cell’s behavior and play a big role in the tumor’s diversity. Metastasis is when a cancer cell forms new tumors in a different location or part of the body that they were primarily made. It is in this spreading, that speeds up the progression of cancer by giving less malignant cells malignant properties.

            It has been difficult to track this process between cells in vivo because of imaging limitations. Since extracellular vesicles are excreted by both tumor and non-tumor cells, without the proper equipment it was hard to determine or measure the affects of EVs coming from specifically tumor cells on other tumor cells. It was also hard to compare the behavior of cells between those that took in tumor-released cells and those that did not. However, in this experiment “intravital imaging with a Cre recombinase- base method” was used to be able to study this type of cell-to-cell interaction. Intravital imaging allows people to view the cell-to-cell interactions in vivo by using a photswichable fluorescent proteins. These fluorescent proteins switch colors when they travel across blood vessels, making it easy to track cells. Scientist specifically studied the extracellular vesicles that were released from malignant human MDA-MB-231 mammary tumor cells to less malignant human T47D mammary tumor cells.

            The MDA-MB-231 cells were first transplanted in mice and the progression of the EVs it released to the T47D cells was tracked. It was confirmed that the mRNAs found in the extracellular vesicles are involved in migration and metastasis through gene ontology analysis. Then it was tested to see if these extracellular vesicles can actually affect the migratory behavior in the T47D cells that uptake it. In order to do this, the migration of eGFP+ and DsRed+  cells were measured and compared. From this it concluded that the T47D cells did have an increase in migration behaviors, which in turn should also increase metastatic potentials since they coincide with each other.

Reference:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26000481