Use the Force to Treat Cancer, Say Chinese Researchers
A healthy human body is subject to numerous mechanical forces. Now biomedical engineers say this could be an important clue in treating the growth of tumours
Cancer is one of the great scourges of modern life. Which is why the research community has devoted tens of billions of dollars to tackling this disease.
And yet the results are decidedly mixed. While it’s true that certain cancers can now be cured, there is considerable controversy over claims that the 5-year survival rate for most cancers has dramatically improved. Critics say this improvement is largely the result of screening programs that lead to earlier diagnosis, pointing out that the clinical progression of the disease hasn’t changed and the time of death is the same as it has always been.
Whatever the truth, there can be little argument that potential new treatments need to be aggressively explored. Enter Li-Ting Yi at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Jing Liu at the Beijing Key Lab of Cryogenic Biomedical Engineering who explore the potential of a cheap, simple and non-toxic new way to tackle the disease.
Their idea is to exploit the effect of mechanical force on tumours; by that they mean everything from massage to more aggressive ultrasound treatment. And the approach is based on some interesting scientific ideas.
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Li-Ting and Jing point out that mechanical forces play an important role on cell development and growth. Biologists have long known that the growth of new tissue is strongly influenced by the three-dimensional forces that act on it.
These forces are important even on a molecular level. They say that cells are fantastically complicated machines and, just like other machines, rely on mechanisms that are influenced by external forces.
For example, deforming a cell’s membrane influences its activity and the signals that can pass through it. And a cell’s cytoskeleton—its internal scaffolding that determines its three-dimensional shape—is clearly affected when the cell is squashed or stretched.
Then there is the process of cell division which relies on precise mechanical forces to assemble the delicate spindle apparatus that segregates chromosomes. It’s not hard to imagine how external forces could disrupt this process.
Then there is the role that external forces play on cell growth. The process by which cancer cells spread into healthy tissue depends on the forces between these cells and the extra cellular matrix. Again, it’s easy to see how external forces can influence this kind of migration.
Indeed, Li-Ting and Jing say there is good evidence that mechanical forces can influence tumour development. They point to experiments in which biologists grew spherical tumours in the lab and then subjected them to external forces which inhibited their growth.
In other words, squashing tumours can stop them growing. “High mechanical stress controlled the size of tumor spheroid through inhibiting the tumor cell proliferation and inducing apoptotic cell death,” they explain.
Of course, this is by no means a silver bullet and Li-Ting and Jing are careful to point to other work in which mechanical forces seem to promote tumour growth.
What’s clear is that much more needs to be done. If mechanical forces are to become a useful form of cancer treatment, medics will need a much better idea of how and why this kind of approach works.
But the potential benefits are huge. Applying forces to a tumour should in many cases be straightforward, cheap and above all non-toxic.
But that raises the question of who will pay for the research necessary to understand and develop this approach. Low cost approaches do not attract commercial investment for the simple reason that profits are hard to come by—the drugs companies that fund much cancer research today would have little or no reason to investigate this approach.
Clearly, Li-Ting and Jing have an uphill battle on their hands in persuading mainstream researchers to devote time, money and effort to exploring an idea that has been almost entirely neglected by mainstream medicine.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1309.4893 : Mechanical Therapy As A Potential “Green” Way To Attack Cancer Disease
