Carl Zimmer
MATTER
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.
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The researchers are taking IGF-II producing cells out of tumors in mice and shutting down the genes they use to make growth-stimulating chemicals. The scientists are then letting these newly created cheaters multiply and putting them back into the tumors.
The team hopes these extra cheaters will disrupt the tumor so badly that it will collapse.
“I certainly buy it — this kind of free-rider behavior has long been predicted,” said Carlo Maley, a biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study.
But he cautioned that the experiment didn’t involve a real case of cancer but just artificial mixtures of cancer cells. Scientists have yet to document cheating in real tumors in animals or humans.
“However, I’m sure it happens,” Dr. Maley added.
