The prostate cancer cell that got away

Date:
November 16, 2021
Source:
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Summary:
Researchers have pioneered a new method to track the progression
of prostate cancer in mice, from its birth to its spread into
other tissues.

This approach allows researchers to study the origins of prostate
cancer in a more realistic context than traditional methods allow.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Associate Professor Pavel Osten
and Professor Lloyd Trotman have developed a new way to study the life
history of prostate cancer in mice. The pair combined their expertise
in whole-organ imaging and prostate cancer to track how prostate cancer
cells grow into tumors and spread to other organs. Their method allows scientists to study the behavior and properties of prostate cancer, for
the first time, in a setting that accurately mimics the disease in real
life. The study led by Julian Taranda, a former postdoc in the Osten lab,
was published in Cell Reports.


========================================================================== Natural tumors usually originate from a single cell that went
awry. However, synthetic tumors grown in lab mice often originate from
millions of cells instead of individual ones. Trotman says this process
does not accurately reflect how cancer usually starts. He explains:
"If you think of skin cancer, right? It's going to be a cell that has
suffered UV irradiation that's going to be the trigger, not essentially
your entire skin in general." The new approach described by Osten
and Trotman uses a more tailored technique to studying very early
prostate cancer. lt uses a virus to transform as little as one normal
mouse prostate cell into a cancerous cell. This lone cancer cell can
be located using a microscope technique called whole-organ serial two-
photon tomography. The tomography machine is fully automated. It takes
an image of all the cells on the top layer of an organ, slices off
that piece, images what is in the next layer, and repeats the process
until it has photographed the entire organ. Then, using an artificial intelligence program, the machine creates a 3D reconstruction of the
organ, at single-cell resolution. Osten says this is important because:
"In the later stages of cancer, you have a big bulk of cancer cells and
it's easy to find them. In the early stage, you may have very few cells
in the organ. And so looking with traditional methods is really painful
because you have to slice and look and find." The researchers were able
to track the progression of prostate cancer cells from their birth up
to 20 days later, when they started spreading within the organ. Later,
these fugitive cells started migrating to the liver and, unexpectedly,
the brain.

The scientists hope this versatile new method will help tackle unexplored questions about the early steps of cancer's growth and escape into other organs, wherever it starts.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
Cold_Spring_Harbor_Laboratory. Original written by Luis Sandoval. Note:
Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Julian Taranda, Grinu Mathew, Kaitlin Watrud, Nour El-Amine,
Matthew F.

Lee, Corey Elowsky, Anastasiia Bludova, Sintia Escobar Avelar,
Dawid G.

Nowak, Tse-Luen Wee, John E. Wilkinson, Lloyd C. Trotman, Pavel
Osten.

Combined whole-organ imaging at single-cell resolution and
immunohistochemical analysis of prostate cancer and its liver and
brain metastases. Cell Reports, 2021; 37 (7): 110027 DOI: 10.1016/
j.celrep.2021.110027 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211116111315.htm

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