Cancerous Communications

The commonly held view of cancer progression is that one rogue mutant cell starts dividing out of control to form a tumour, which then expands and invades the surrounding tissue. But, new research suggests there’s much more to it than that. It’s not simply a case of the tumour bullishly conquering its environment. Instead, there seems to be an ongoing communication between the tumour and surrounding tissue, a positive feedback loop of signalling, that's needed to promote the cancer’s growth. This image shows a feature of such tumour-tissue crosstalk in skin with a growth factor that promotes tumour invasion (stained red) being released at the border (green) between the surrounding tissue and the cancer cells. The hope is that, if scientists can eavesdrop on these cancer-tissue conversations, they can figure out a way to silence them and shut the cancer down.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Shaopeng Yuan and colleagues
• Robin Chemers Neustein Laboratory of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Nature, November 2022