AsianScientist (Nov. 19, 2018) – An international team of scientists has observed predatory motion in invasive cancer cells similar to how animals hunt in the wild. They reported their findings in Nature Communications.
When animal predators search for sparsely distributed food, they maximize their chances of success by adopting a special movement pattern composed of many small steps interspersed with infrequent but long strides towards new hunting grounds. These so-called ‘Lévy walks’ have been studied for several decades and observed in foraging mammals, birds, sharks and even immune cells searching for infected cells.
In this study, researchers at the Center for Soft and Living Matter of the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in South Korea, collaborating with colleagues in the US, the Netherlands and Poland, have reported that when cancer cells become metastatic—a state of high mobility and aggressiveness—they start behaving in ‘predatory’ ways.
The team used metastatic and non-metastatic prostate, breast and skin cancer cells, placing these cells in linear micro-tracks and observing their motion. The researchers measured the cells’ step size and turning points for up to 16 hours.
Moreover, the scientists tracked the trajectories of individual melanoma cells directly inside living mouse skin, at a depth of 600 micrometers. In all cases, metastatic cells moved according to the Lévy walk, while non-metastatic cancerous cells took only small steps, a pattern known as diffusive motion.
Although it is presently unclear why metastatic cells perform such predatory motions, one hypothesis is that they capitalize on it to find suitable places where to seed deadly secondary tumors, the researchers noted.
The team also demonstrated that it was possible to reprogram the metastatic cells’ Lévy walk. Using specific chemical inhibitors or short interfering RNA, the scientists blocked selected proteins involved in structuring the cellular skeleton and protrusions, which resulted in inhibition of the Lévy walk in the invasive cells.
“The deadly cellular wolves start moving like cuddly sheep!” said Professor Bartosz Grzybowski of IBS, who co-led the study.
However, he cautioned that more experiments are required to understand the clinical implications of these findings.
The article can be found at: Huda et al. (2018) Lévy-like Movement Patterns of Metastatic Cancer Cells Revealed in Microfabricated Systems and Implicated in vivo.
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Source: Institute for Basic Science; Photo: Shutterstock.
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