Caught on Video: Cancer Cells in Act of Cannibalism
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Tumors rely on a variety of tricks to grow, spread, and resist our best attempts to destroy them. Now comes word of yet another of cancer’s surprising stunts: when chemotherapy treatment hits hard, some cancer cells survive by cannibalizing other cancer cells.
Researchers recently caught this ghoulish behavior on video. In what, during this Halloween season, might look a little bit like The Blob, you can see a down-for-the-count breast cancer cell (green), treated earlier with the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin, gobbling up a neighboring cancer cell (red). The surviving cell delivers its meal to internal compartments called lysosomes, which digest it in a last-ditch effort to get some nourishment and keep going despite what should have been a lethal dose of a cancer drug.
Crystal Tonnessen-Murray, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of James Jackson, Tulane University School of Medicine, New Orleans, captured these dramatic interactions using time-lapse and confocal microscopy. When Tonnessen-Murray saw the action, she almost couldn’t believe her eyes. Tumor cells eating tumor cells wasn’t something that she’d learned about in school.
As the NIH-funded team described in the Journal of Cell Biology, these chemotherapy-treated breast cancer cells were not only cannibalizing their neighbors, they were doing it with remarkable frequency [1]. But why?
A possible explanation is that some cancer cells resist chemotherapy by going dormant and not dividing. The new study suggests that while in this dormant state, cannibalism is one way that tumor cells can keep going.
The study also found that these acts of cancer cell cannibalism depend on genetic programs closely resembling those of immune cells called macrophages. These scavenging cells perform their important protective roles by gobbling up invading bacteria, viruses, and other infectious microbes. Drug-resistant breast cancer cells have apparently co-opted similar programs in response to chemotherapy but, in this case, to eat their own neighbors.
Tonnessen-Murray’s team confirmed that cannibalizing cancer cells have a survival advantage. The findings suggest that treatments designed to block the cells’ cannibalistic tendencies might hold promise as a new way to treat otherwise hard-to-treat cancers. That’s a possibility the researchers are now exploring, although they report that stopping the cells from this dramatic survival act remains difficult.
Reference:
[1] Chemotherapy-induced senescent cancer cells engulf other cells to enhance their survival. Tonnessen-Murray CA, Frey WD, Rao SG, Shahbandi A, Ungerleider NA, Olayiwola JO, Murray LB, Vinson BT, Chrisey DB, Lord CJ, Jackson JG. J Cell Biol. 2019 Sep 17.
Links:
Breast Cancer (National Cancer Institute/NIH)
James Jackson (Tulane University School of Medicine, New Orleans)
NIH Support: National Institute of General Medical Sciences
thanks for the notification. this is really a very fantastic finding as far as cancer is concerned.
The wonders of biology never cease – many thanks to the NIH for making these amazing discoveries possible.
The novel findings pertaining to cancer cells’ cannabilsm mechanisms were indeed spectacular!
With my proven expertise as evident in lead/first authorships-peer-reviewed publications in the ever-expanding receptors-cell signaling-cell death-autophagy-necrosis-apoptosis-mediated cancers, including HPV-mediated cervical cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, gall bladder cancer/hepatocellular carcinomas/alcoholic liver-related malignancies. colorectal cancer, I would like to further add that the meticulously presented research data should be replicated in future public health-oriented patient-centric health disparities’ research in ethnically disparate cohorts of both American and/or Asia-Pacific Indian (North/South Indian) disease/cancer patient subsets and healthy, disease-free controls from random populations with genetic associations/pharmacogenetics-related research for developing an eventual cost-effective public health research model.
Future investigational drugs and/or logically designed synthetic drugs coupled with receptors/ion channels inhibitors and/or agonists/antagonists may prove therapeutically efficacious in addressing the increasing burden of human cancers globally.
Certainly, the tricky stunts of clever cancer cells cannibalizing adjacent pre-cancerous and/or other phenotypically distinct cancer cells in specific target tissues pre-post chemo-radiotherapy, are overwhelming, and warrant further research in the anti-cancer field!
Programmed vs non-programmed cell death mechanisms by targeted maipulation of immunomodulatory signaling pathways may be beneficial in designing patient-friendly anti-cancer regimens with minimal adverse effects following chemotherapy/radiotherapy protocols in both high as well as low-resource patient-centric healthcare centers; the eventual transition from the laboratory with in vitro/in vivo/human subject research to the clinic should be strategically planned for translating the cannabilsm-cancer cells-research outcomes to individual ethnically distinct patient-population subsets for drawing definitive conclusions with eventual clinical/public health impact.
Unbelievable, almost like something straight from a science fiction novel. Thank you for sharing this video and associated information. Thank you also to NIH for your dedication and continuing efforts in making for a healthier nation.
thank you for sharing this beautiful insight…