Study reveals new insights on cancer spread

Cells are known to respond to physical stimuli including stiffness, fluid shear stress, and hydraulic pressure. Though extracellular fluid viscosity is a key physical cue known to vary under physiological and pathological conditions like cancer, its influence on cancer biology and the exact mechanism of cells sensing and responding to changes in viscosity was hitherto unknown.?

A global team of researchers has now unfolded a new mechanism that enables cancer cells to move throughout the body. Their discovery can provide a potential new target to arrest metastasis which claims 90 per cent of cancer deaths. According to this path breaking research, cancer cells tend to move faster when surrounded by thicker fluids, a change that follows when the lymph drainage is compromised by a primary tumor.?

The researchers contend that elevated viscosity counterintuitively increases the motility of various cell types on two-dimensional surfaces and in confinement. Cumulatively, extracellular viscosity is a physical cue that regulates both short-term and long-term cellular processes with pathophysiological relevance to cancer biology.

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