By Carissa Wong.
A cancer cell has a tube in it.
The person is Tanmoy Saha.
Cancer cells can boost their own growth by stealing energy-generating parts.
We know that some cell types grow structures made of actin. One cell can link itself to another so the two can move components between them.
The first evidence that cancer cells can do something similar is that they can hijack the mitochondria from two types of immune cells, T-cells and natural killer T-cells, both of which can kill cancer cells.
Shiladitya Sengupta at Harvard Medical School says that it is surprising that cancer cells send out nanoscale tentacles and suck out the mitochondria.
He and his colleagues put immune cells and cancer cells from mice in the same dish for 16 hours before taking pictures of their interactions. They found that the cancer cells formed a single nanotubes with a T-cell, while most of the nanotubes were between 50 and 2000 metres wide.
The team discovered that the mitochondria were transferred towards the cancer cells by using a fluorescent chemical marker.
Read more about the human trials for cancer therapy.
When cancer cells were placed in contact with T-cells for 16 hours, they consumed more oxygen and reproduced more often than a group of cancer cells that were not in contact with T-cells.
It is suggested that stealing the mitochondria helps cancer cells grow. Cancer cells grown in the presence of separated T-cells reproduced and respired at a similar rate to cells grown without T-cells.
T-cells consumed less oxygen when cultured in contact with the cancer cells, suggesting that the loss of mitochondria reduced the immune cells ability to survive and grow.
Experiments involving human cells from different types of cancer found that the mitochondria are transferred along with the nanotubes. The researchers found that a drug that reduced the formation of T-cells in cancer cells halved the size of the tumours in mice, and increased the density of T-cells in tumours, when used alongside a clinically available treatment calledPD1 blockade.
The drug could have other effects that reduced the size of the tumours, so the findings should be verified using more specific tools.
Nature Nanotechnology is a journal.
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