Release date: 2016-10-28
One of the main causes of cancer life-threatening is the metastasis of tumor cells in patients. Therefore, studying the process of tumor cell metastasis and invasion is crucial for understanding the deadly mechanism of cancer. A few days ago, a research progress announced by Chongqing University is expected to solve the mystery of tumor cell metastasis and provide ideas for exploring new treatments.
How tumor cells move in the body has become a research hotspot of scientists in various countries in the world in recent years. One difficulty of this research is that the three-dimensional tissue structure of human blood vessels is very complicated, and it is not easy to simulate the transfer of tumor cells in experiments.
Liu Yuyu, a professor at the School of Physics of Chongqing University, and the Princeton University of the United States and the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, after several years of cooperation, used microbial chip technology to successfully construct a three-dimensional microenvironment that mimics tumor cell invasion in vitro. Different from traditional clinical in vivo experiments or biological research methods, this method overcomes the defects that cells in culture dishes are difficult to simulate tumor cell invasion in a two-dimensional environment, and opens up new methods for studying cancer metastasis. "The in vitro three-dimensional model method needs to be improved, but it is close to the microenvironment of human body and tissue, which helps scientists to better study the invasion environment and metastasis process of tumor cells." Liu Yuyu said.
The feasibility of constructing a three-dimensional model in vitro is confirmed to be the initial stage of the study. In the past three years, Liu Yuyu team and collaborators have used collagen to construct micro-structures adjacent to tissues and blood vessels during breast cancer cell metastasis, and found that oriented collagen fibers in human tissues Greatly assist and enhance the invasive ability of cancer cells. The study was published in the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences.
Studies have shown that in biochips, collagen fibers are subtly engineered into oriented structures, which are characteristic of tissue structure in patients with advanced cancer who develop breast cancer. These oriented collagen fibers may greatly promote the metastasis of tumor cells.
"These fibers arranged in a line are like a highway that invades the cancer cells. The cancer cells use these 'highways' to overcome the resistance caused by human tissues, making it time-saving and labor-saving. And thus spread to various parts of the human body." Liu Yuyu said that when cancer cells sense that there is no "highway" in the surrounding tissue environment, they can repair the "highway" while moving quickly along the "road." This finding may explain why soft cancer cells can invade and shuttle through the walls of blood vessels in dense human tissues, causing tremendous damage to patients in a short period of time.
Currently, changes in the orientation of collagen fibers are often caused during the course of radiation therapy and chemotherapy. This may provide a rapid "reverse" "highway" for cancer cells that remain after treatment, which in turn leads to a worsening of subsequent cancer metastasis. "Future treatment methods can reversely think and develop new targeted drugs, not only for cancer cells, but also try to inhibit the cancer's ability to build roads through drugs, destroying the 'highway' built by them, and greatly slowing the transfer speed. Extend or even save the lives of patients." Liu Yuyu said.
In addition to Liu Yuyu's team research, in recent years, scientists have used various means to study the ability of cancer cells to metastasize in complex micro-environments. In 2014, a research team at the University of Science and Technology of China published a new report on the mechanism of cancer cell migration in small tubular structures in Cell magazine. Not long ago, German scientists published a report in Nature, revealing that tumor cells can kill. Specific cells in the wall of the dead blood vessels, thereby leaving the blood vessels and establishing a phenomenon of metastases.
Source: People's Daily
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