May Help Tumors Spread by Enlisting Immune Cells
May 27, 2022, by Nadia Jaber
Lymph nodes are bean‐shaped organs that filter viruses, bacteria, and cancer cells out of the body. When you’ re sick and the doctor feels the sides of your neck, they
’ re checking to see if your lymph nodes are swollen with immune cells fighting off an infection.
In mice, cancer cells( blue) that spread to the lymph nodes( orange) appear to convince immune cells( purple) to help the cancer spread to other organs( lungs and liver).
Credit: Nathan Reticker‐Flynn, Ph. D.
Before a tumor spreads from its original location to other parts of the body, it typically invades nearby lymph nodes. For more than a century, researchers have debated whether this invasion of lymph nodes helps the cancer spread( or metastasize) to other organs.
A new study in mice suggests that it is an important step for cancer metastasis, and details how that happens.
The study, partially funded by NCI’ s Cancer Systems Biology
Consortium
, showed that cancer cells in the lymph nodes of mice encouragee immune cells to protect tumors rather than attack them. As a result, the initial tumor essentially gains a passs to spread to the rest of the body.
The findings were published May 6 in Cell.
Cancer cells“ not only avoid attack in the lymph nodes, but they actually turn things completely around and somehow convince the immune system to help the tumor spread,” explained the study’ s senior scientist, Edgar Engleman, M. D., of Stanford Medicine.