Stomach cancer establishes electrical connections with nearby sensory nerves and uses these circuits to stimulate their growth and propagation, according to the conclusions of a study collected this Wednesday in Nature.
The finding is the first time that electrical contacts between nerves and cancer outside the brain are described, which opens the possibility that there are other tumors that advance by establishing similar connections.
“We knew that many brain tumors took advantage of nearby neurons to boost their growth, but we had not been able to verify similar processes in other types of cancer,” says one of the authors, Timothy Wang, professor of digestive medicine at Columbia University (New York ).
“Knowing this expansion mechanism would allow us to use drugs designed for neurological conditions to treat cancer,” advances a statement from Columbia University.
A recent research route
Until just two decades, the research of cancer progression had focused on the role of immune cells or blood vessels in the tumor environment, without paying too much attention to nerve connections.
“The nervous system works faster than any other types of tumor micro -environment cells, allowing tumors to communicate more quickly and remodel their environment to favor their growth and survival,” says Wang.
The researcher has already discovered a decade ago to cut the vagus nerve into mice with stomach cancer significantly slowed tumor growth and increased the survival rate.
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The lazy nerve contains many types of neurons. In this study, Wang and his team have focused on sensory neurons, which were the ones that reacted with the greatest intensity of the presence of stomach cancer in the mice.
The scientists saw how the sensory neurons of the vago nerve extended to the depths of stomach tumors in response to a protein released by cancer cells called nervous growth factor (NGF).
After establishing this connection, the tumors sent signals to the sensory nerves to induce electrical signals in the tumor that favored their growth.
Although it is possible that cancer cells and neurons do not form associations in the place where they are, “there is no doubt that neurons create an electrical circuit with cancer cells,” says Wang.
Cancer migraine medications
The discovery of these associations led researchers to suspect that certain inhibitory medications used to treat migraines could short circuit the electrical connection between tumors and sensory neurons.
The experiments with mice showed that these drugs reduced the size of stomach tumors, prevented survival from extending and extended.
“The analysis of the data of stomach cancer patients indicates that the circuits we have found in mice also exist in humans and that addressing them could be an additional useful therapy,” says the researcher.
With EFE information.
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