Cancer cells turn healthy cells to the ‘dark side’

The team studied thousands of different growth factors, proteins and receptors across different pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma cells to see how signals were being transmitted.

They recognised well-known pathways that KRAS uses to communicate with neighbouring healthy cells, but also noticed something unusual. By monitoring proteins in the two cells at the same time, they discovered that healthy cells were responding with a totally new message – a message that doubled the capacity for KRAS to drive malignant behaviour in the cancer cells.

Study author Dr Chris Tape, Sir Henry Wellcome Research Fellow at the ICR, said: “What our research underlines is that cancer cells do not drive the growth and spread of tumours alone – they can bully their healthy neighbours into helping them.

“Some pancreatic tumours have more healthy stromal cells within them than they do cancer cells, so understanding how cancer cells turn their neighbours into allies is critically important. We have discovered exactly how cancer cells can persuade stromal tissue to secrete key growth signals, and in doing so opened up exciting new possibilities for treatment."

Dr Claus Jorgensen, who led the research at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and is now a junior group leader at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, The University of Manchester said: “We now know that tumours are a complex mix of genetically diverse cancer cells and multiple types of healthy cells, all communicating with each other via an intricate web of interactions.

“Untangling this web, and decoding individual signals, is vital to identify which of the multitude of communications are most important for controlling tumour growth and spread. We have identified a key role played by the most commonly mutated gene in cancer in communicating with healthy cells. Blocking its effects could be an effective cancer treatment.”

The paper, ‘Oncogenic KRAS Regulates Tumor Cell Signaling via Stromal Reciprocation’, was published in the journal Cell.

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Cancer cells turn healthy cells to the ‘dark side’