Breakaway breast cancer cells survive because they have the receptors for the chemokines that immune cells use to guide them to sites of infection.Ninety per cent of people who die from breast or lung cancer do so because their primary tumour metastasises, which involves cancer cells breaking off and forming tumours elsewhere. But no one was quite sure how these cells managed to survive, until now. Marina Kochetkova and Shaun McColl of the University of Adelaide in Australia looked at receptors for chemokines, which direct white blood cells called leukocytes to sites of infection or inflammation. They found that two chemokine receptors, CXCR4 and CCR7, were active on the surface of highly invasive, metastatic human breast cancer cells. And stimulating these receptors with chemokines kept metastatic cells alive for longer than cancer cells without chemokine receptors.
