According to the results of his research, published in the magazine 'Nature Cancer', the cells remain motionless by segregating a type of collagen, called type III collagen, in the surrounding environment, and only become evil when the collagen level decreases.They discovered that when enriching the environment of cells with this collagen, they could force cells to remain in a latent state and avoid reappearance of the tumor.
"Our findings have potential clinical implications and can lead to a new biomarker to predict tumor recurrences, as well as a therapeutic intervention to reduce local and distance relapses," says the main author, José Javier Bravo-Cordero, associate professor of hematologyand Medical Oncology at the Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Institute.
"This intervention aimed at preventing the awakening of latent cells has been suggested as a therapeutic strategy to prevent metastatic growth, '' continues-.As the biology of tumor latency is discovered and new specific drugs are developed, a combination of treatments that induce latency with therapies that are specifically directed to latent cells will end up preventing local recurrence and metastasisCancer remission ".
Most cancer deaths are due to metastasis, which can occur several years after the removal of a tumor.Previous investigations have studied how scattered tumor cells leave their latency status and now this new work has shown how cells remain latent.
The study used high -resolution image techniques, including intravital microscopy of two photons, a technology that allows visualizing latent cells in their real time environment in a living animal.This technology allowed researchers to track latent tumor cells into mouse models with cell and neck cancer cell lines.
Thanks to this technology, the researchers could visualize the changes in the architecture of the extracellular matrix as tumor cells became latent and how they changed when these cells aroused.
In patient samples, researchers showed that collagen abundance could be used as a potential measure to predict tumor recurrence and metastasis.In the mouse models, when scientists increased the amount of type III collagen around the cancer cells that had left a tumor, the progression of cancer was interrupted and the disseminated cells were forced to enter a latent state.
Similar to wound treatment, in which collagen scaffolding have been proposed as a therapeutic alternative for complex skin wounds, this study suggests that by using strategies aimed at enriching the tumor microenvironment in type III collagen, you canPrevent metastasis activating the latency of tumor cells.