CANCER CELLS IN ACTION: Fusion of cell nuclei (red) in emerging cancer cells in a mouse model of human breast cancer. Actin filaments in the cell cytoplasm are stained green.THOMAS RIED/NCI CENTER FOR CANCER RESEARCHFive years ago, scientists at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City showed that circulating tumor cells (CTCs) could both colonize metastatic sites and travel back to their tumors of origin. Taking advantage of this bidirectional CTC movement, researchers at the University of New Mexico and their colleagues injected mice with CTCs that were genetically modified (GM) to express an anticancer cytokine. The team found that these GM CTCs were able to home to tumors and release the cytokine, leading to decreased tumor growth. The results, published February 8 in PNAS, suggest that cancer cells may be useful tools for anticancer therapies.
“This paper is an elegant example of thinking outside the box,” said Elizabeth Comen, a medical oncologist and researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering who was not involved with the work. “To leverage the cancer cell’s powerful ability to travel all over the body against tumors is fascinating.”
“The idea is interesting and audacious,” Joan Massagué of Memorial Sloan Kettering, who was a coauthor on the 2009 paper showing bidirectional CTC movement but was not involved in the present study, wrote in an email to The Scientist.
The University of New Mexico’s Wadih Arap, Renata Pasqualini, and their colleagues engineered murine tumor cells derived from three tumor types—melanoma, lung, and mammary adenocarcinoma—to express and release tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α). TNF-α is a cytokine shown to ...
