As you may know, in the human lung lined with hair-like protrusions, we are going to these bumps are called cilia movement, the cilia is composed of some tiny tubes, usually appear on the surface of certain cells or tissues, for example, in our there is movement in the nose and respiratory cilia, these cilia movement will move from side to side, remove microorganisms, mucus, and death cells in the respiratory system, etc. However, there may be a more important subclass of motile cilia, called ciliary. ciliary are found in almost all cells in the body, but they are not always present.
The functional structure of these cilia is very important. Interfering with their formation or function can lead to cilia diseases, which often cripple and endanger the life of patients and affect the functions of multiple organs in the body. Why does the failure of such a small organelle cause a variety of disease symptoms? The researchers found that cilia are packed with proteins that detect signals from other cells and their surroundings, which are then sent to the nucleus to activate the body's reactions, which are crucial for regulating the body's signaling pathways. And these signaling pathways are also associated with cancer, so it is particularly important to study the relationship between cilia and cancer.
The researchers found that in many cancers, there was a significant lack of ciliary structure in cancer cells compared to surrounding healthy cells. This may be because the absence of cilia is a response to cancer, interfering with the regulation of normal cells.

Melanoma is a malignant skin cancer, and some melanoma cells will express higher levels of EZH2 protein, which will inhibit the expression of cilia gene so that melanoma has less cilia structure, and the absence of cilia can activate part of the carcinogenic signaling pathway, so as to cause malignant metastasis of melanoma cells. But within the same cancer, there are differences. Because there is very close relationship between cilia and cancer, so the researchers wanted to study to elucidate whether targeted action of ciliary structure treatment can be used as a cancer therapy, as things stand, when cancer is one of the researchers are faced with the problem produced against cancer drug resistance, many drug targets are cilia on market adjusting part of the signal path. Scientists have found that blocking the growth of cilia in drug-resistant cancer cell lines may restore the sensitivity of cancer cells to treatment. They hope to further study cilia in the future to help understand their close association with cancer development and develop new therapies to effectively treat many types of cancer.