A Cancer biologist at Yale University, John Pawelek, might have found a very interesting thought on how cancers metastasize. While reading a cancer journal he came across an idea suggested by Czech scientists stating that tumor cells and white blood cells fuse together to make a hybrid. At the time he was reading a book by Lynn Margulis, an evolutionary biologist, who suggested the idea that ancient cells engulfed each other in order to improve the chances for survival. He was interested by the connection and thus started researching and experimenting with cancer and white blood cells. In 15 years of studies, he was able to confirm that cancer cells do in fact fuse with white blood cells, also known as macrophages, and become highly metastatic. He took weak metastatic cancer cell and fused them with mouse white blood cells. The results were astonishing.
55% of the hybrid cells were very deadly and metastatic while the melanomas did not metastasize at all. Unfortunately this was only tested in laboratory animals. But he still believed that cancer cells metastasize by hybridizing with white blood cells due to the fact that white blood cells can travel anywhere in the body. He claims that technology is so up to date that we can now actually test this compared to 15 years ago by examining patients who have received bone marrow transplants. An example is of a boy with type O blood who received a bone marrow transplant from his brother, who is type A, and when he later developed kidney cancer the tumors were found to possess type A blood, suggesting that there was some type of fusion going on. Even though this seems like a clear way to prove his hypothesis, it is not for sure that these cells were hybrids, they could in fact just have originally come from the donors bone marrow. He also stats that, "macrophages regularly engulf germs and unhealthy cells—they might occasionally fuse with tumor cells instead of destroying them, much as ancient cells once joined together into symbiotic relationships a billion years ago, he reasons."
Although this seems like a very interesting way of thinking about how cancers metastasize, I still think research shows that we can not truly accept this idea because there might be other explanations why it seems like cancer cells and macrophages hybridize in the human body. A cell biologist at Stanford University, Irving Weissman, states that he has seen this research become faulty over and over again. He states that people might think cells are hybrids when they are actually just cells that are adhering to each other (Pawelek claims he made sure that this error was not made in his research). Weissman also states the opposite, suggesting that hybrids are actually less cancerous due to the fact that the healthy DNA helps surpass the malignant activity. Just like any any other field of cancer, there is still a lot of research to be done on this subject/field and many questions to answer, so I don't think I can take a side just yet. The only think I hope for is the next step, if there is a potential hybridizing metastatic cancer, a way of fighting these hybridized cells and eradicating them from our body. The only question that I could think about is if this hybrid does exist, would this be easier to terminate metastatic cancer. In other words would it be a simpler way of battling cancer by targeting all these hybrid cells, which would all be cancerous, and then just removing the original tumor; thus, eliminating any chance for metastasize and the prevention of new tumor formation?
Article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=investigating-cancers-deadly-fusion
