A research team at The Tisch Cancer Institute, which focuses on the burgeoning field of cancer dormancy, has identified a promising strategy for preventing metastasis from occurring.
Developing effective treatments that target cancer cells and eradicate them from the body is the gold standard in medicine. But in many cases, a patient’s body continues to harbor cancerous cells that have remained dormant for five-to-ten years, only to awaken and begin metastasizing in a different organ with a strength that becomes impossible to control. In fact, most cancer deaths are due to metastases.
A research team at The Tisch Cancer Institute, which focuses on the burgeoning field of cancer dormancy, recently identified a promising strategy for preventing metastasis from occurring. Their study, in Nature Cancer, found that when collagen III—a key human protein—was in ample supply within the tumor’s microenvironment, cancerous cells in breast and head and neck cancers remained dormant. The team observed that tumor cells that were replicating had less collagen III than tumor cells that were dormant and that by adding or removing collagen III they could influence the proliferation of cancer cells.