Sci Transl Med: What's new! The body's stress hormones may promote sleeping cancer cells to wake up and cause the cancer to return!

December 5, 2020 // -- In a recent study published in the international journal Science Translational Medicine, scientists from the United States, Germany and other countries jointly found that natural stress hormones may reactivate dormant cancer cells in mice, and that the results may help develop new treatments for cancer.
Photo Source: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Today medical scientists have been trying for years to understand why cancerous tumors sometimes relapse years after initial successful treatment, and in this study, researchers found evidence that cancer recurrence occurs when dormant cancer cells are awakened by stress hormones in the patient's body.
Previous studies have shown that when cancerous tumors begin to grow, some cells move to other nearby locations and go into a dormant state, which seems unlikely to be killed or removed by surgery or chemotherapy because they are far away and dormant.
Previous studies have shown that dormant cells like these suddenly wake up and begin to grow into new tumors, sometimes even years after treatment; in the paper, researchers explain the molecular mechanisms by which dormant cancer cells resuscitate, which are blamed on the body's stress hormones, such as epinephrine.
By injecting these hormones into mice carrying dormant cancer cells and observing how they resuspension and how they began to multiply, the researchers also found that mice tested were less likely to form new tumors from the cancer cells that woke up if given β blockers, which reduce the protein levels expressed by the hormone.
In addition, the researchers collected serum samples from the bodies of 80 lung cancer patients who undergoes surgical removal of tumors, and found that patients carrying high levels of S100A8/A9 (the protein released by epinephrine) may be more likely to develop new tumors.
Finally, the researchers say giving cancer patients β blockers may be an effective way to prevent the recurrence of certain types of cancer, and that drugs specifically blocking the production of S100A8/A9 may be a better treatment.
original source: Michela Perego, Vladimir A. Tyurin, Yulia Y. Tyurina, et al. Reactivation of dormant tumor cells by modified lipids derived from stress-activated neutrophils, Science Translational Medicine (2020). DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abb5817。