It is therefore encouraging that researchers at Penn State University have now discovered how breast cancer cells manage to invade healthy tissue elsewhere in the body.
That discovery could be a potential game changer in the treatment of breast cancer.
‘Cell paralysis’ indicates a paradigm shift
Researchers have discovered how a protein called dynein helps control the movement of cancer cells through body tissue.
Using a model that mimics a breast tumor, the researchers discovered that dynein is essential for the cells to spread to healthy tissue.
Dynein is simply the main key to the movement of cancer cells.
This means that metastasis may be able to be stopped if we can find a way to control the protein’s route through the body.
‘This discovery indicates a paradigm shift in several respects. Until recently, we didn’t know that dynein is crucial for the ability of cancer cells to move through the body. But if we can target dynein, we can stop the motility of these cells, and thus the metastasis,” said Erdem Tabdanov, assistant professor of pharmacology at Penn State and one of the lead authors of the study.
According to the researchers, it is very realistic that dynein can be blocked so that cancer cells can no longer move properly to healthy tissue.
Therefore, the breakthrough offers promising prospects for treatments that could prove to be better than the cancer treatments we know now.
‘Instead of killing cancer cells with radiation or chemotherapy, you can also paralyze them. And it is an advantage if you do not have to kill the cells, because that is a harsh approach that affects both cancer cells and healthy cells. You just have to make the cancer cells stop moving,” says Tabdanov.
Of researchers noted that a clinical treatment is still a long way off, because they have not yet conducted any tests on humans or animals.
2023-11-09 00:27:33
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