How cancer erodes cellular ‘glue’ to spread through the body

Normally our cells are bound together with a complex combination of proteins, including E-cadherin, which is the primary ‘glue’ that keeps our cells in place.

However, sometimes this cellular glue is eroded, and cells can dislodge and move through the body.

Read more about microRNA, cancer and cellular bonds.

This is particularly problematic with cancer cells, which can move through the bloodstream and take up residence elsewhere in the body as a secondary tumour, a process called metastasis.

It’s long been known that the protein hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) plays a role in the erosion of the cellular glue, but until now the mechanism involved remained a mystery.

Now, researchers from the University of Queensland have revealed how HGF breaks the cellular bonds, giving an insight particularly into how cancers spread through the body.

They found that HGF disrupted another protein actin, which functions as an internal scaffold within cells, and connects to E-cadherin on the outer surface of the cell.

HGF is involved in causing another protein, Myosin VI, to break the essential bond between the actin scaffold and the E-cadherin bonds between cells.

“So HGF was causing this interlinked meshwork of proteins to come apart, breaking up the system and causing cells to drift apart,” said Professor Alpha Yap, one of the authors of the study.

This finding has significance for understanding how cancers spread, and helps highlight potential new drug targets that could prevent HGF from unsticking cells from each other.

“The discovery of this pathway may open new avenues to understand exactly how proteins that bind cells together are affected in disease, which could lead to new targets for treatments of such disease, including cancer,” said Yap.

The study was published in the latest edition of the international journal Current Biology.

It was funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia. Confocal imaging was performed at the Australian Cancer Research Foundation (ACRF) Cancer Biology Imaging Centre at the IMB, established with the support of the ACRF.