Metastases, I can see right through you!
Cancer cells lit up in transparent mice
A Japanese team of scientists has developed a new method of tissue processing that allows to examine cancerous tumors in mice with accuracy to individual cells.
Cancer cells disperse separately throughout the body, and for the development of a full-fledged tumor, a single cell that has entered the organ is often enough. Therefore, when studying oncological diseases, scientists often face the problem of tracking metastases.
In microscopy, fluorescent tags are widely used for these purposes: luminous proteins (luciferase or fluorescent proteins) are embedded in tumor cells, which allows you to monitor their fate in the body. However, the resolution of this method is not enough to display individual cancer cells – radiation from them does not pass through the skeleton well and is scattered in tissues. To solve this problem, a group of scientists from several scientific organizations treated the tissues of the slaughtered mice with an anti-inflammatory solution that removes a significant part of lipids and makes the tissues transparent. This method allows you to work not only with individual organs, but also with whole animals, inside of which luminous metastases become noticeable.
With the help of the new technology, several things were found out. First, different tumors grow differently. Scientists injected mice with labeled cells of several tumor lines, both mouse and human. They spread through the body, penetrated into the organs and divided there. It was noticed that the lines differ in the size and location of cell colonies.
Secondly, tumors may adhere to different migration strategies. Some cell lines are found closer to the blood vessels, as they are used for settlement. Others settle in the depths of the tissue, probably secreting proteins that cause new vessels to grow in their direction.
Finally, not all tumor cells survive when resettled. But the well–known protein - transforming growth factor beta - can help them in this. When a cancer cell begins to secrete it, it suppresses the activity of the cells of the surrounding tissue and the immune system. If cancer cells are treated with this protein in advance, they metastasize better and form more colonies.
Scientists expect that their method will be useful in the study of potential cancer drugs, since with the help of transparent mice it becomes possible to accurately control the population of tumor cells in the body.
The results of the study are published in the journal Cell Reports (Kubota et al., Whole-Body Profiling of Cancer Metastasis with Single-Cell Resolution).
A drawing from an article in Cell Reports.
We also recommend watching two beautiful videos
in the appendix to the article on the EurekAlert website! Watch cancer spread in a mouse – VM.
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06.07.2017