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The untrained eye likely wouldn’t have noticed, but doctoral student Ruth Pye immediately spotted something unusual about the way the cells were arranged in a tissue sample from a facial tumor of a Tasmanian devil. Tumor cells plucked from the marsupials normally grew and divided more slowly, but these established themselves much faster in culture, and had longer projections extending from their spindle-shaped cell bodies, she recalls.
It was early 2014, and Pye was examining a biopsy taken from a diseased devil on a remote peninsula on the southeast side of Tasmania. Her lab at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research at the University of Tasmania received such samples as part of a government-sponsored monitoring program to study the notorious cancer that had been decimating populations of the island’s namesake marsupial. Known as devil facial tumor disease (DFTD), the cancer differs from most in that it ...
