A team of bioengineers and bioinformaticians at the University of California San Diego have discovered how the environment surrounding a tumor can trigger metastatic behavior in cancer cells. Specifically, when tumor cells are confined in a dense environment, the researchers found that they turn on a specific set of genes and begin to form structures that resemble blood vessels.
In the past, physicians observed these blood vessel-like structures in the clinic–a phenomenon called vascular mimicry, which is associated with some of the most aggressive types of cancers. But they didn’t understand what caused this transformation.
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