Finnish Study Could Lead to Better Lung Cancer Drug

A recently-developed hypothesis about the methods in which lung cancer cells spread throughout the body could result in progressively better treatments and offer cancer researchers all over the world with an improved knowledge base of how diseases such as lung cancer grow and develop.

A team of scientists conducting research at VTT Technical Research Center of Finland has detected a cellular process that lung cancer cells utilize when dispersing to other organs of the body. The observation of this previously undetected mechanism could lead researchers to a better understanding of the metastatic processes of all types of cancer and could set a precedent for later courses in the treatment and investigation of numerous other cancers.

The combined research efforts of VTT, the University of Turku in Finland and the University of Heidelberg in Germany, have also discovered a component in cancer cells of several different types that dictates how cancer spreads throughout the body. The feature shared by these research results is that they spell out the deadly capability that malignant cells possess to begin the process of spreading from site of the primary tumor and move to other organs.

The joint research project was also able to determine how cancer cells have the ability to alter themselves in a way that an element within those cells that had earlier served to keep them at the original tumor site begins to help the adhesion receptors within those cells. In previous studies, researchers worked under the assumption that one of the causes of metastasis was that the malignant cells lose the vital components that link them to the surrounding healthy cells. However, this recent investigation discovered that the cancer cells use their adhesion factors to move throughout the body. In time, this process gives the cells the ability to move to other parts of the body and to create metastasized cancers in other tissues. The study also established that cancer cells apply their adhesion receptors in a way that had not been discovered by earlier cancer research efforts.

Results from these studies, published in the May 2009 issue of the scientific journal Nature Cell Biology, will help clinical investigators who are involved with the analysis of all types of lung cancers, such as malignant pleural mesothelioma, a fast-growing cancer that spreads rapidly and is typically fatal within two years of a patient receiving a diagnosis. One of the causes of mesothelioma is long-term inhalation of asbestos fibers, commonly occurring while working on construction sites, shipbuilding projects or other jobs where workers would find asbestos particles.

Up to this point, conventional treatment routines for mesothelioma have not shown a high rate of success. The idea is that, with new theories like those developed in this study, newer, better and more effective treatments could be developed by following the route outlined by Finnish researchers as opposed to traditional cancer treatment methods. Scientists are already examining this new theory and are considering the best avenues on how to attack the issue of malignant cell adhesion receptors, specifically in such fast-acting diseases as malignant mesothelioma.

Sources: MTB Europe, TransWorldNews

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