Self-eating for survival
Study shows how cancer cells "eat" themselves to survive
Maria Krivochenko, Naked Science
A team of researchers from the Danish Cancer Society has discovered a new way in which cancer cells repair dangerous damage. It turned out that they resort to macropinocytosis for regeneration. Details of the work are published in the journal Science Advances (Sønder et al., Restructuring of the plasma membrane upon damage by LC3-associated macropinocytosis).
Usually cells use it to absorb molecules from the outside. And immune cells use it to "eat" foreign bodies, such as bacteria or viruses. Cancer cells use macropinocytosis to repair the membrane. They "pull" the whole membrane onto the damaged area, and the rest of it is divided into fragments and sent to the lysosomes, where it splits.
In this way, cancer cells are able to reuse damaged membranes as a source of energy. This is useful because they often divide and require a lot of energy and material for new cells.
In the laboratory, the authors of the work recreated this process. They damaged the membrane of cancer cells with a laser and started macropinocytosis. Then they suppressed the process of self–healing and splitting of damaged membranes - this is how cancer cells died.
"Our research provides knowledge about how cancer cells survive. We have also shown that cancer cells die if macropinocytosis is suppressed. That is, this process can become a target for new therapies," he said The head of the study is Jesper Nylandsted, an employee of the Danish Cancer Society Research Center and the University of Copenhagen.
The work continues: now scientists are investigating how cancer cells protect their membranes and what happens after the damaged areas are closed. "We think that the first patch is a bit rough and after that a more thorough repair is required. This may be another weak point in cancer cells, and that's what we want to study more closely," said Stine Lauritzen Sender, co–author of the study.
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