A team of researchers recently discovered that acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) has a mechanism that allows it to avoid a protective barrier of the brain and invade it. The findings are described in a study published in the journal Nature.
Knowing such a mechanism will provide scientists with new ways to focus on the pathway that cells use to enter the central nervous system and, if possible, block it, said study lead author Dorothy Sipkins of the Duke Cancer Institute.
When the ALL reaches the central nervous system “is very difficult to treat”, because most drugs are blocked in the “blood-brain barrier” —designed to protect the brain from the dangers of bloodstream. For that reason, knowing how cancer cells go through it has been an unanswered question for decades.
Now, doing tests on mice, Duke researchers found that blood cancer does not break the blood-brain barrier to infiltrate the central nervous system, but avoids it.
Cancer cells in ALL have receptors that can attach to proteins on the outside of blood vessels, which carry them from the bone marrow through the membranes to the cerebrospinal fluid.
Sipkins, who is an associate professor at Duke, noted that the way cancer cells travel to the central nervous system is “very unexpected.”
However, knowing this mechanism gives the experts new ways to focus on “that path and, hopefully, close it,” added the scientist.
The finding represents more than a decade of research, in which most of the time was in a “blind alley” to try to find the key by which the ALL was able to cross the blood-brain barrier.
Source: Agencia ID
