When cancer metastasizes, cells detach from an initial malignant tumor and form colonies elsewhere in the body that can grow increasingly aggressive and dangerous.
Myriad scientific papers dating back to 1997 show that as tumors grow larger and pack themselves more tightly into a confined space, the resulting compression makes them more likely to metastasize and to exhibit increased survivability, invasiveness, and aggression. Now, research published March 8 in eLife demonstrates in vitro and in mice that a different kind of compression called confined migration, which metastasizing cancer cells experience as they squeeze through narrow blood vessels, can spur different changes that help the cells survive.
It’s a “rather surprising” result, says Romain Levayer, a cell death and cancer researcher at the Pasteur Institute in France who didn’t work on the study, because for noncancerous cells, “compression is usually associated with cell death and apoptosis.”
“Their results are important to ...
