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June 26, 2019

Cancer breakthrough: Yale researchers make discovery

PHOTO | CONTRIBUTED Andre Levchenko
By Michelle Tuccitto Sullo

Yale University scientists announced this week that they have made a crucial discovery about the spread of cancer cells.

The discovery may lead to new methods for treating cancer, according to researchers. Cancer is among the leading causes of death in the United States, second only to heart disease, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to Yale, researchers have discovered how metastasis, or the spread of cancer cells, is triggered on the molecular level. They also developed a way to detect those triggers in patients with certain cancers.

Andre Levchenko, the John C. Malone Professor of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Yale Systems Biology Institute at Yale’s West Campus, led the study, which was published June 26 in the journal Nature Communications.

“We are very excited about this,” Levchenko said in a phone interview. “We try to understand cancer as a complex disease. We focused on this very interesting phenomenon in cancer progression where cells decide not to stay in one space, but to spread out.”

“This is what kills 95 percent of patients — this metastatic spread,” he said.

According to Levchenko, the research could lead to better treatment and medications, and hopefully, cures and better survival rates.

Metastasis sometimes happens through a process called “epithelial-mesenchymal transition,” or EMT, a process that “ breaks neighboring cells apart from each other and sets them in motion,” according to the university announcement.

While chemical signals or genetic changes were believed to trigger this process, researchers found a different cause: “a change in the texture of the extracellular matrix (ECM), which acts as a scaffold for cells.”

“It became clear that in some cancers, before the cells move away from the tumor and spread, there’s a change in the environment,” Levchenko said in Yale’s announcement. “When these fibers in the matrix align, they create tracks in which the cells move, and we found how it is controlled by complex molecular networks.”

Levchenko compared it to “highways” that spread throughout the body.

Researchers looked at this EMT process and discovered two feedback mechanisms: “One connected the protein known as YAP to the gene regulator WT1, causing cells to break from each other. The other connected YAP to the protein TRIO, triggering the cells into motion and even increasing their speed,” the press release said.

The researchers were specifically looking at renal cancer. However, Levchenko said they have evidence the same process is at work in other cancers, including glioblastoma.

Contact Michelle Tuccitto Sullo at msullo@newhavenbiz.com

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