![]() The cells traveled to the mini vertebra nearly twice as often as they did to the little long bone, as if lured by a cancer-calling Pied Piper. ![]() Then, the researchers injected breast cancer cells into the mice and watched where they ended up. Each transplant formed miniature bones, or organoids, in the animals’ bodies - a tiny vertebra on the right, for example, and a bit of long bone on the left. In one key experiment, Greenblatt’s team transplanted spinal stem cells into one hind leg of mice and long bone stem cells into the other. The results suggest that the stem cells are a key driver of spine metastasis in breast cancer. In an experiment in mice, vertebral bone (red) formed by a newly identified type of stem cell recruits breast cancer cells (green) to the bone tissue. The team’s discovery raised the possibility that spinal stem cells might play a role in spinal disease. “We assumed they were the same,” says Geert Carmeliet, a cell and molecular endocrinologist at KU Leuven in Belgium who was not involved with the work, but wrote an accompanying commentary. Until now, scientists didn’t know that these two types of bones held distinct populations of stem cells. These new stem cells switched on a separate set of genes and behaved differently in experiments, the researchers found. Greenblatt’s team pulled out a population of stem cells from mice vertebrae distinctly unlike ones collected from long bones. The researchers had a hunch that stem cells inside vertebral bones differed from those in other sites in the skeleton, like the long bones in the arms and legs. What did end up making sense was stem cells. But for him and his team, “that didn’t make sense to us scientifically.” It’s what Greenblatt learned when he was a medical student. One idea proposed in 1940, that actions like coughing jolt blood off course and somehow send cancerous cells to the vertebrae, still hangs on today. Such damage can hamper people’s ability to walk and control their bladder and bowels, and shorten their life spans.ĭoctors have known for decades that some cancers preferentially seek out the spine, Greenblatt says, but no one has had a good explanation for why. For these patients, “spine metastases are one of the most common complications,” Greenblatt says, “and one of the most dreaded.” Tumors that take root in the spine can crush the spinal cord, which houses nerve bundles crucial for body sensation and movement. And of the bones in the skeleton, cancer cells preferentially seek out vertebrae. In people with metastatic breast cancer, some 70 percent experience subsequent bone cancer. “This is a major advance in our understanding of bone metastasis,” says Xiang Zhang, a cancer biologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who was not involved with the new study.
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