Nervous system actively promotes pre-cancerous pancreatic lesions
Pancreatic cancer has a lot of nerve. Notoriously tricky to detect, the disease also often resists traditional therapy . So, researchers are urgently looking for new ways to disrupt tumor formation. Though scientists know that the nervous system can help cancer spread, its role in the disease's earliest stages remains unclear. "One phenomenon that is known is called perineural invasion," says Jeremy Nigri, a postdoc in Professor David Tuveson's lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). "This means cancer cells will migrate within the nerve and use the nerve as a way to metastasize." Now, Nigri and his colleagues at CSHL have discovered that the nervous system plays an active part in pancreatic cancer development, even before tumors form. Using 3D imaging, they found that tumor-promoting fibroblasts called myCAFs send out signals to attract nerve fibers. The myCAFs and nerve cells then work together within pancreatic lesions to create a favorable environ...