Some cells in a tumor feed off others to help them survive and possibly metastasize, according to a report published March 29 in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology. The authors say this occurs when a DNA repair protein complex is disabled in cancer cells, a deficiency that kills the cells unless they invade neighboring tumor cells and gather cytoplasmic material. They report that this is the first evidence, to their knowledge, that cancer cells can become parasitic in the absence of a critical gene.
“Despite the interesting and thought-provoking results, the study is still a proof of concept. More experiments are needed to verify this finding,” Jawad Fares, a neuro-oncology fellow at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine, writes in an email to The Scientist.
Okay Saydam and Nurten Saydam, molecular biologists at the University of Minnesota, sought to learn how cancerous cells adapt to the loss of the ...
