Can cancer cells infect normal cells

March 29, 2023
On October 23, an article first published in the American journal Nature Science revealed that when a cancer cell excretes waste products, that cancer cell can infect healthy cells adjacent to it and turn them into tumor cells.

Cancer cell vesicles

Many cells, including cancer cells, are surrounded by hundreds of tiny vesicles, also called extracellular bodies, separated by membranes. Extracellular bodies are composed of proteins, DNA and RNA. These vesicles have long been thought to manage metabolic waste, but in fact they strengthen cell-to-cell connections: some of them can fuse with other cells and insert their own "probes" into them.

Vesicles can cause cancer

Researchers injected breast cancer cell extracellular bodies into rats along with healthy normal cells, and found that the normal healthy cells turned into tumor cells. This result paves the way for finding markers to monitor the formation mechanism of cancer cells, and may even well be a beacon for treating cancer.

Cancer cell infection of healthy cells study

It has been shown that cancer cells can produce more extracellular bodies than healthy cells. Some researchers have studied the difference between the extracellular bodies of cancer cells and the extracellular bodies of healthy cells. They separated the extracellular bodies from the attached cells and found that, unlike healthy cells, the extracellular bodies of cancer cells contain fragments required to produce tiny RNAs that cut off the expression of target genes, i.e., have the effect of destroying healthy cells. Gene expression is affected when healthy cells come into contact with cancer cell extracellular bodies. When these extracellular bodies were injected into rats, experimental results showed that they could cause tumors. If the tiny RNA gene fragments in the extracellular bodies of cancer cells are disrupted, the growth of tumors stops. The scientists also conducted comparative experiments on the extracellular bodies of cells from eight normal people and 11 breast cancer patients. The extracellular bodies of normal cells from eight healthy people and cancer cells from 11 patients were mixed with healthy cells and injected into rats. The extracellular bodies from 5 of the 11 breast cancer patients were found to cause lesions in healthy cells, while none of the cells from the 8 healthy individuals caused lesions.
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