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Cell Fusion Theory: Can It Explain What Triggers Metastasis?
Cell Fusion Theory: Can It Explain What Triggers Metastasis?
jnci.oxfordjournals.org
JNCI
News 1279
n 1992, John Pawelek, Ph.D., was working with melanoma cells when he read an
article that asked whether the fusion of
cancer cells and white blood cells could lead
to metastasis. Intrigued, he found that his
cells fused easily to white blood cells called
macrophages and that these hybrids resembled metastatic melanoma cells.
Since then, I havent looked back, said
Pawelek, a senior research scientist at Yale
School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn.,
whose primary research focus is now the cell
fusion theory of metastasis. In a May 2008
article in Nature Reviews Cancer, Pawelek and
Ashok K. Chakraborty, Ph.D., also at Yale, lay
out the case for the theory, which could
explain one of the mysteries of metastasis:
What is the trigger that enables cells to break
free from the original tumor and travel to distant sites?
Still unproven, cell fusion theory is
very speculative, said Robert Weinberg,
Ph.D., at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in Cambridge, who is also
studying metastasis. But preclinical studies
have convinced Pawelek and others that it
is an intriguing and worthwhile possibility.
His results make it appear likely that cell
fusion happens, he said, but to what extent
and whether it results in metastasis is still
under investigation.
Fusion theory is not new. Digging into
the literature, Pawelek found that the
German pathologist Otto Aichel had proposed the idea in 1911. While viewing cancer biopsy samples under the microscope,
Aichel saw that white blood cells attacked
tumor cells. He proposed that cancer cells
and white blood cells might join, resulting
in the greater number of chromosomes
common in cancer cells and conferring a
malignant cell with the ability to move
through the bloodstream as white blood
cells do.
Scientists know what a cell must do to
metastasize. First, the original tumor must
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