In the Way Cancer Cells Work Together, a Possible Tool for Their Demise

A tumor, as strange as it may sound, is a little society. The cancer cells that make it up cooperate with one another, and together they thrive.

Scientists are only starting to decipher the rules of these communities. But if they can understand how these cells work together, then they may be able to stop the tumor. “You can drive it to collapse,” said Marco Archetti, a biologist at the University of East Anglia and at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Cancer starts when healthy cells mutate and lose the safeguards that normally keep their growth in check. The cells start to multiply quickly, and their descendants gain new mutations, some of which make the cells even better at multiplying.

As tumors rapidly develop, they outgrow their blood supply, and stores of nutrients and growth-stimulating chemicals, known as growth factors, run low. As it turns out, cancer cells survive this harsh new environment by helping one another.

New mutations can cause cancer cells to start making their own growth factors, and they don’t keep these essential chemicals to themselves. Growth factors seep throughout the tumor, affecting all the cells. “It’s one of the hallmarks of cancer,” Dr. Archetti said.

This kind of cellular cooperation can get complicated, as Dr. Edward J. Gunther, an oncologist at Penn State College of Medicine, and his colleagues discovered while studying breast cancer tumors in mice. More