A group of doctors and scientists from the Tufts University School of Medicine and Ireland's University of Ulster (UU) have made substantial strides in determining the specific triggers of cancer cells.
Their work could ultimately yield crucial insight into the development - and eventual treatment - of cancer.
Thus far, the team's success is largely based on its use of UU's world-renowned bio-imaging technology. This resource has allowed the Tufts researchers, co-led by Professors of Anatomy and Cellular Biology Ana Soto and Carlos Sonnenschein, to develop a 3-D model of the mammary gland, thus enabling them to study how cells form cancerous tissues and how they can return to their normal states.
According to UU's Director of Advanced Imaging George McKerr, this current research is novel in that it neither studies cancer tissues at a single point in time nor outside of their natural environments.
Instead, he said, "the team at Tufts has come up with a novel system where tissues are grown in a controlled environment where stimuli for the [3-D] organization and structuring of heterogeneous tissues can be studied with the added dynamic of passage of time."
According to McKerr, this allows for valuable and unique study. "Being able to follow tissue change and remodeling with time is going to address how tumors first form and whether this process follows similar and established predictions," he said.
Although this marks progress in cancer research, Kurt Saetzler, a lecturer in computational biology at UU, said that "cancer is a very complicated process [and] it has proved impossible to control all other circumstances and vary just one parameter in order to follow changes at the cellular level."
Therefore, despite the team's breakthroughs, a good deal of work remains before it can accurately determine the exact cause and development process of cancerous cells and tissues.
Soto said that all cancers begin the same way, so the choice to use the mammary gland was a pragmatic one.
"We are studying breast cancer because at Tufts we have already developed a 3-D model of the mammary gland that would allow direct observation of the earlier steps of [cancer growth]," she said.
The results thus far of the research between Tufts and UU scientists appear to contradict previous studies in the field.
"[The Tufts-UU] experiment contradicts the expectations ... that cancer is a cell-based phenomenon," Soto said.
Rather, the newer 3-D model developed by the Tufts researchers indicates that cancer is tissue-based and caused by altered communication between stromal cells and the epithelium.
The effects of such a finding provide the Tufts-UU team, as well as future researchers, with a new and exciting possibility to explore all types of cancer cells and tissues in their studies.
But Soto warned that it is best not to jump to conclusions when dealing with cancer research, regardless of how promising certain results may seem.
"We are operating at the blurry periphery of the unknown. When we anticipate what may happen in such a realm we should try to be humble and cautious and not oversell our expectations," she said.
In the past, she said, "cancer patients and their loved ones were encouraged to build unwarranted hopes for cures that never materialized."
