They found that the stem cells from the two locations expressed markedly different sets of genes.
Working in mice, scientists in Greenblatt’s laboratory isolated stem cells from both the vertebrae and what are known as the long bones, such as the femur in the leg. On the trail of invasive cells in breast cancer These features led Greenblatt and his colleagues to suspect that they form through a different mechanism than other bones. Spines are unique to vertebrate animals, and the spinal vertebrae don’t carry some of the proteins often thought of as characteristic of bones. The work appears on 13 September in Nature. Greenblatt and his team’s results, “I would argue, overturn this very old paradigm”, he says. This idea “is still the classic dogma that’s taught in medical schools”, says Matthew Greenblatt, a pathologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City and a co-author of the latest study. One theory from the1940s proposed that forceful events such as coughs can momentarily reverse blood flow and jolt cancer cells into the vicinity of the spine, where they form new tumours. Scientists have discovered a new type of stem cell that gives rise to the backbone - and that helps to drive the frequent metastasis of breast tumours and other cancers to the spine 1.Ĭertain cancers, including those in the breast, prostate and lung, spread preferentially to the spine, but the reasons have been unknown. A scan (artificially coloured) of upper vertebrae reveals cancer that spread from a breast tumour.
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