Yale study focuses on how cancer spreads

NEW HAVEN >> A Yale Cancer Center researcher and his team may be closer to understanding how cancers spread throughout the body, according to a release from Yale University.

When a cancer moves outside the tumor, or metastasizes, it can become more difficult to treat and more threatening to the patient. What the research team found confirmed a 2013 study in which a melanoma cell fused with a white blood cell to form a hybrid cell that easily spreads from the tumor into other areas of the body, according to the release. Se-

nior research scientist John Pawalek of the Yale Cancer Center worked with colleagues at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Center and the Denver Crime Laboratory.

In the study, the tumor of a patient with melanoma who had had a bone-marrow transplant was biopsied.

A mixture of patient and donor DNA was found both in the primary tumor and in lymph nodes, where the cancer had spread, the release said. This was a clue that the cancer cells and white blood cells had fused, the release said.

“The cancer cell and white blood cell DNA were mixed into the same nucleus,” Pawelek said in the release. “The hybrid has both the white blood cell propensity to move into lymph nodes as well as the dividing characteristics of the primary tumor.”

For future research, “We need to focus on how fusion between white blood cells and cancer cells actually occurs,” Pawelek said. “There are a lot of steps involved in that process and those steps are all vulnerable to targeting.”

Potential treatments might include preventing the fusion of bone marrow cells, targeting the process of metastasis, the release said.

The study was published Jan. 27 in the journal PLOS ONE.