A simple channel is all it takes to challenge established beliefs about cancer cell migration and offer a solution.

If you're unlucky enough to be diagnosed with a malignant form of cancer one of the first things the doctor will test are your lymph nodes. The outcome of this test dramatically changes your prognosis and the treatments used, as cancer cells can spread from the lymph nodes throughout the body, a process known as metastasis. Now, work by Daniel Irimia and Mehmet Toner at Harvard Medical School in Boston, US, suggests the mechanism of metastasis may be different to previously thought.

Cancer cells migrate along channels within polymer tubes (top right and light blue in left schematic) small enough to fit in the wells of a 96-well plate

Until now the hypothesis has been that for cancer cells to spread they need a concentration gradient to direct their motion. Irimia's work, however, shows that the gradient is not necessary and that when they are constrained within a small channel cancer cells will spontaneously move in one direction. 

Irimia and Toner initially designed their microchannel system to investigate guided cancer cell migration, to mimic the process occurring along vessels and fibres in the body. However, Irimia says they were surprised to find that the cells could travel continuously in one direction for hours without a chemical gradient being applied. They noted that some cells could still migrate after being exposed to the anticancer drug Taxol, something Irimia describes as 'scary'.

Peter Friedl, an expert in cell migration from the Nijmegen Centre for Molecular Life Sciences in the Netherlands, suggests that the researcher's system could also be used to study cancer treatments. 'The device complements existing migration assays,' he says. 'It allows the study of 3D migration in a defined environment that is amenable for [high-throughput] research, particularly for screening for anticancer drugs.' 

The pair says that this is their next step as they plan to use the equipment to investigate how the cancer cell migration can be stopped. Their aim is to perform screens by placing the devices into a 96 well plate, a standard piece of lab kit. 'My feeling is that if we are able to stop the cells [in the microchannels] it will have some relevance,' says Irimia. 'But that's just my intuition at the moment. I'm sure if we start looking at this carefully and engage other people to use the assay then we'll get something useful.'

Laura Howes

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