• Question: what else can cancers use aside from blood vessels to help them grow and spread?

    Asked by nadiaretrac to Debbie, Glyn, Jon, Kat, Nicola on 8 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by elicockrel69.
    • Photo: Jonathan Stone

      Jonathan Stone answered on 8 Mar 2013:

      This is probably a question for @Kat – I don’t know much about cancers.

    • Photo: Glyn Barrett

      Glyn Barrett answered on 8 Mar 2013:

      I think Kat is the expert on this so should be able to answer you better than me! – But I think that wherever cancer grows, it needs a good supply of blood. Sometimes cancer cells can break off from the original growth, and spread to other parts of the body. Cancer cells do this by hitching rides on other cells, attaching to structures on their outside (called integrins) – just like velcro. When these cells pass into the blood stream they take the cancer cells along with them and take them to other parts of the body. Cancer is also spread via the lymphatic system – that’s why lymph nodes can swell up in certain kinds of cancer.

      There is loads of good research going on and hopefully a cure will be found soon. Maybe more developed robots in the future will help!!

    • Photo: Kathryn McMahon

      Kathryn McMahon answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      This is a really good question, and something that we’re doing a lot of research into at the moment. Cancers can spread by three main routes – the blood vessels, the lymphatic system (these are a network of tubes in the body that act as a drainage system for fluid from blood and also transport your white blood cells) and by crawling around your body cavity, from one organ to another. They’re pretty crafty and different cancers tend to like to spread by different mechanisms (for example, breast cancers often spread though the lymphatic system, ovarian cancer cells will crawl to the nearby liver). As Glynn mentioned, they can hitch a ride on other cells to help them – there is a lot of research at the moment into how we can stop them from doing this.
      When it comes to cancer growth, some cancers are more dependent on blood vessels than others, and you can see this when you slice them up and look at them. For example, brain tumours will contain a lot of vessels, where as breast cancers will not. I wish I could give you a simple answer as to why this is so, but its a complicated mix of where the cancers originally grow (the brain normally has a lot of blood vessels, and the breast doesn’t), how advanced and aggressive the cancer is (aggressive breast cancer, that is harder to cure, often has more blood vessels for example) and partly how the cancers grow. For example, some cancer cells really like to be near vessels and will travel through tissue to get to them, and then grow more of them, whereas others will grow in a big mass, where the centre of the tumour dies and only the outside cells are living as the mass gets bigger and bigger. These tumours don’t need as many blood vessels.
      As you can see, cancer is very varied, which is why its taking us so long to find cures for some of them. Different cancers from different parts of the body can be very different in the way they behave, which is fascinating for scientists, but very frustrating for doctors!

    • Photo: Nicola Fletcher

      Nicola Fletcher answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      Cool answer, thanks Kat!

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