A major mystery in cancer research has been solved: How cancer cells remain dormant for years after leaving a tumour before awakening to create metastatic cancer.
According to findings by Mount Sinai researchers which were reported in Nature Cancer, the cells remain quiet by secreting a type of collagen, called type III collagen, in the environment around themselves, and only turn malignant once the level of collagen tapers off. The researchers found that by enriching the environment around the cells with this collagen, they could force the cells to remain in a dormant state and prevent tumour recurrence.
“Our findings have potential clinical implications and may lead to a novel biomarker to predict tumour recurrences, as well as a therapeutic intervention to reduce local and distant relapses,” said senior author Jose Javier Bravo-Cordero, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine (Hematology and Medical Oncology) at The Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai. “This intervention aimed at preventing the awakening of dormant cells has been suggested as a therapeutic strategy to prevent metastatic outgrowth. As the biology of tumour dormancy gets uncovered and new specific drugs are developed, a combination of dormancy-inducing treatments with therapies that specifically target dormant cells will ultimately prevent local recurrence and metastasis and pave the way to cancer remission.”
Most cancer deaths result from metastases, which can occur several years after removal of a tumour. Previous work looked at how dispersed tumour cells awaken from dormancy; this new work showed how the cells remain dormant.
The study used high-resolution imaging techniques, including intravital two-photon microscopy, a technology that allows the visualisation of dormant cells in their environment in real time in a living animal. This technology allowed the researchers to track dormant tumour cells in mouse models using cancer cell lines. By using this technology, the researchers were able to visualise the changes in the architecture of the extracellular matrix as tumour cells became dormant and how it changed when these cells awoke.
The researchers demonstrated that an abundance of the collagen could potentially be used as a predictor of tumour recurrence and metastasis. In the mouse models, when type III collagen was increased around cancer cells that had left a tumour, cancer progression was interrupted and the disseminated cells were forced into a dormant state. Similar to wound treatment, in which collagen scaffolds have been proposed to treat complex skin wounds, this study suggests that by enriching the tumour microenvironment in type III collagen, metastasis may be prevented by sending tumour cells into a dormant state.
Source: The Mount Sinai Hospital / Mount Sinai School of Medicine
