CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 24 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists have found cancer cells reactivate dormant proteins shut off during early embryonic development and use them to travel throughout the body.
Researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and other institutions said a dormant gene regulator in mice called Twist is reactivated by tumor cells after being shut down during early embryo development. The cancer cells then use it to travel to different organs.
Twist -- which essentially tells genes to turn on or off -- is active in embryonic development, allowing cells to move back and forth within the embryo to different tissues. After a while, Twist's function is no longer necessary and it becomes dormant in most tissues.
Although it is a bit unclear, tumor cells somehow reactivate these types of proteins and acquire their ability to travel in the body.
This discovery has implications for the treatment and diagnosis of cancer since Twist is one of the first proteins to be definitively tied to human cancer metastasis -- the transfer of disease from one organ to another, the researchers said.
