Rice study could aid the development of cancer-slowing drugs

Rice study could aid the development of cancer-slowing drugs
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BY JADE BOYD
Rice News Staff

Cancer researchers
know the disease spreads from organ to organ in a non-random
pattern, but they are unable to predict exactly how cancer
will spread, in part because of the limited tools available
to study cancer-cell migration in a controlled laboratory
setting. In groundbreaking new research, Rice University
scientists have designed a computerized system that can
track the movement of individual cancer cells growing in
a three-dimensional culture of model living tissue. The
system can be used to categorize the metastatic patterns
of different cancers and to help test the effectiveness
of cancer-slowing or proposed cancer-prevention drugs.

Described in
the Sept. 15 issue of Cancer Research, the Rice study involved
experiments on two types of cancer cells — a strain
of breast cancer and a variant of skin cancer. The researchers
placed cancer cells from each strain into two types of simulated
soft tissue. Using computer automation, the researchers
tracked and analyzed the movement of individual cells as
they migrated through the tissue.

The skin cancer
migrated faster, spread further and penetrated deeper in
both types of tissue. However, the research also revealed
similarities between the strains. For example, both types
of cells showed a tendency to oscillate, burrowing into
tissue, reversing briefly and burrowing back along a slightly
different vertical path. This suggests that both types of
cancer invade tissue by seeking or creating a path of least
resistance.

“The most
important element of this work is not the differences we
observed in the metastatic patterns of these two types of
cancer. It’s the methodology we developed to study
the movement of cancer cells in living tissue,” said
study co-author Larry McIntire, chair of Rice’s Institute
of Biosciences and Bioengineering. “Studying tumor-cell
invasion in live cultures in real time is a significant
advance.”

Only with in
vitro studies of 3-D cell migration can scientists gather
data on critical factors that influence metastasis, including:

• the percentage
of mobile cells in a specific cancer strain
• the speed of cell movement
• the direction that cells move
• how long cells move in a particular direction
• how often cells turn and in which direction
• the way movement changes in reaction to chemicals
or obstructions

McIntire’s
co-author on the article is Zoe N. Demou, now a postdoctoral
fellow at the Steele Laboratory for Tumor Biology at Harvard
Medical School in Boston.
Cancer Research, published by the American Association for
Cancer Research, is the most frequently cited cancer journal
in the world and among the 15 most-cited scientific journals
in the world.