Every month, I’ll be highlighting breast cancer research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: HOW do breast cancer cells overpower your usually fantastic immune system?
So, what would happen if someone took the battery out of your car?
Could you start it? Check the time? Turn on the air conditioner? Turn on the heat? Signal a turn? Auto-open the doors or roll down the windows?
Of COURSE not. The car battery is the foundation on which all other functions of your car rest. Without the battery, you can’t turn over the starter. Once the car starts, you can run it off the motor of course, but as any good Minnesotan knows, a battery’s CCA (aka Cold Cranking Amps) is essential to starting your car in the winter!
So, what does that have to do with breast cancer, you ask?
Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and MIT have discovered that “cancer [cells] can disarm its would-be cellular attackers by extending out nanoscale tentacles that can reach into an immune cell and pull out its power pack. Slurping out the immune cell's mitochondria powers up the cancer cell and depletes the immune cell.”
And what exactly does that mean?
After reading the book above to my grandson (his dad HATES the book and his mom isn’t real excited about it…I found it utterly charming! The cranky grandma reminds me of me!), I realized it was an excellent metaphor to use to communicate this new theory of how cancer cells defeat our usually robust immune system.
Imagine a cancer cell as a particularly nasty octopus (only with way more than 8 arms!). It invades the body (and we’re not even sure how THAT happens yet – they say it’s mutations, but WHAT CAUSES THE MUTATIONS THAT CAUSE CANCER? [Subject for another post!] and when the cancerous cell runs smack into a white blood cell (which is designed to EAT cells that don’t belong in your body), it extends these nanofibers (that is, “tentacles”)) into the white blood cell (or WBC).
Then it turns on the vacuum cleaners. But it doesn’t just pull a Dracula and drink all the blood from those WBC protectors. Each tentacle targets a very special organ (technically, its one of the numerous “organelles” in an individual cell) in a WBC called a mitochondria.
(I first ran across these organelles when I read Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s novel, A WIND IN THE DOOR…). The simplest explanation is that they are the “batteries” that power a cell – they create the energy that runs a cell. How? They suck up the sugar you eat.
Plain and simple. From the sugars, they break them into pieces and the build the battery whose brand name is ATP (the company’s full name is Adenosine Tri Phosphate). Any cell in the body can use this ATP to power the cell.
The Cancer Octopus, or, to introduce a phrase, “Canctopus” uses its tentacles to vacuum up the WBCs mitochondria…
No mitochondria, no power, and the WBC stops running. The cancer cell wins and starts to grow, adding the stolen mitochondria to its own engine so that it can crank up to NASCAR racer speed.
So the problem is now for scientists to figure out how to either tie the Canctopus’ tentacles in knots, or to get a new breed of WBCs to do a reverse flow on the cancer cell and suck THEIR mitochondria out! Wouldn’t THAT surprise the cancer cell!
Alas, any such construction is a long, long way into the future. I’ll keep you posted…
Resources: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211118203652.htm
Image: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51FwQe4KpBL._SX218_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_FMwebp_.jpg
So, what does that have to do with breast cancer, you ask?
Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and MIT have discovered that “cancer [cells] can disarm its would-be cellular attackers by extending out nanoscale tentacles that can reach into an immune cell and pull out its power pack. Slurping out the immune cell's mitochondria powers up the cancer cell and depletes the immune cell.”
And what exactly does that mean?
After reading the book above to my grandson (his dad HATES the book and his mom isn’t real excited about it…I found it utterly charming! The cranky grandma reminds me of me!), I realized it was an excellent metaphor to use to communicate this new theory of how cancer cells defeat our usually robust immune system.
Imagine a cancer cell as a particularly nasty octopus (only with way more than 8 arms!). It invades the body (and we’re not even sure how THAT happens yet – they say it’s mutations, but WHAT CAUSES THE MUTATIONS THAT CAUSE CANCER? [Subject for another post!] and when the cancerous cell runs smack into a white blood cell (which is designed to EAT cells that don’t belong in your body), it extends these nanofibers (that is, “tentacles”)) into the white blood cell (or WBC).
Then it turns on the vacuum cleaners. But it doesn’t just pull a Dracula and drink all the blood from those WBC protectors. Each tentacle targets a very special organ (technically, its one of the numerous “organelles” in an individual cell) in a WBC called a mitochondria.
(I first ran across these organelles when I read Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s novel, A WIND IN THE DOOR…). The simplest explanation is that they are the “batteries” that power a cell – they create the energy that runs a cell. How? They suck up the sugar you eat.
Plain and simple. From the sugars, they break them into pieces and the build the battery whose brand name is ATP (the company’s full name is Adenosine Tri Phosphate). Any cell in the body can use this ATP to power the cell.
The Cancer Octopus, or, to introduce a phrase, “Canctopus” uses its tentacles to vacuum up the WBCs mitochondria…
No mitochondria, no power, and the WBC stops running. The cancer cell wins and starts to grow, adding the stolen mitochondria to its own engine so that it can crank up to NASCAR racer speed.
So the problem is now for scientists to figure out how to either tie the Canctopus’ tentacles in knots, or to get a new breed of WBCs to do a reverse flow on the cancer cell and suck THEIR mitochondria out! Wouldn’t THAT surprise the cancer cell!
Alas, any such construction is a long, long way into the future. I’ll keep you posted…
Resources: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211118203652.htm
Image: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51FwQe4KpBL._SX218_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_FMwebp_.jpg
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