Penn professor whose mRNA research paved way for COVID-19 vaccine is leading new treatments thedp.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thedp.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
CRISPR-Based Cancer Cell Lineage Tracing Offers Insights into Drivers of Metastasis
January 22, 2021
Source: Science Photo Library - Moredun Animal Health Ltd/Getty Images
A new CRISPR-based method for tracing real-time cancer progression across thousands of cells has revealed novel insights into the rates, routes, and drivers of cancer metastasis. Using the lineage-tracing technique, Whitehead Institute member Jonathan Weissman, PhD, and colleagues were able to treat cancer cells in much the same way that evolutionary biologists might look at species, mapping out an intricately detailed family tree. The approach allowed the authors to generate phylogenies and follow the movement of metastatic human cancer cells over several months of growth and dissemination, in a lung cancer xenograft mouse model.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
When cancer is confined to one spot in the body, doctors can often treat it with surgery or other therapies. Much of the mortality associated with cancer, however, is due to its tendency to metastasize, sending out seeds of itself that may take root throughout the body. The exact moment of metastasis is fleeting, lost in the millions of divisions that take place in a tumor. “These events are typically impossible to monitor in real time,” says Jonathan Weissman, MIT professor of biology and Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research member.
Now, researchers led by Weissman, who is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, have turned a CRISPR tool into a way to do just that. In a paper published Jan. 21 in Science, Weissman’s lab, in collaboration with Nir Yosef, a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and Trever Bivona, a cancer biologist at the University of California at San Francisco, tre
E-Mail
IMAGE: Each color represents a different location in the body. A very colorful tree shows a highly metastatic phenotype, where a cell s descendents jumped many times between different tissues. A tree. view more
Credit: Jeffrey Quinn/Whitehead Institute
When cancer is confined to one spot in the body, doctors can often treat it with surgery or other therapies. Much of the mortality associated with cancer, however, is due to its tendency to metastasize, sending out seeds of itself that may take root throughout the body. The exact moment of metastasis is fleeting, lost in the millions of divisions that take place in a tumor. These events are typically impossible to monitor in real time, said Whitehead Institute Member Jonathan Weissman.