Tobacco use often produces precancerous cells that increase a person's risk of developing lung cancer, but researchers don't know how precancerous changes affect the development of cancer. Scientists from the duke university medical research center recently presented a new idea at the American association for cancer research, which suggests that these precancerous cells may turn nearby cells cancerous.
"We wanted to understand how these precancerous cells influence nearby cells to become cancerous," said researcher Dr. Kim a. Binder. "we studied the communication mechanism between precancerous lesions and cancer cells in the context of the presence of enzymes called PI3K.In most cancers, enzyme PI3K is activated, and the over-activation of PI3K is a necessary condition to drive carcinogenesis.PI3K is a kind of kinase, and there are many kinase inhibitors that can effectively resist the spread of cancer cells. Kinase inhibitors are effective against PI3K and do a good job of killing cancer cells grown in petri dishes, but they are not effective in patients' bodies, which is a noteworthy phenomenon.
The current study provides an important clue that cancer cell lines in petri dishes are very sensitive to PI3K inhibition, but in the vicinity of precancerous cells, these cancer cells become resistant to inhibitors. The researchers cultured lung cancer cells in the same petri dishes as precancerous cells, and then attacked the cells with PI3K inhibitors alone or together. The results showed that cancer cells that grew together with precancerous cells grew faster and developed tolerance to PI3K inhibitors than cancer cells that grew alone.
In addition, precancerous cells can stimulate the production of cancer stem cell-like properties in receptor cancer cells, which means that in addition to being able to resist PI3K inhibitor therapy, cancer cells next to precancerous cells may become more dangerous, such as the cancer cells spreading again. Or that cancer cells are given cancer-like and stem-like qualities by nearby precancerous cells.