What if doctors could peer through a patient’s skin and see a cancer tumor growing? They’d be able to study how tumor cells migrate: how they look, how they interact with the blood system to find nourishment to grow and spread through the body.Scientists at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine can’t look through human skin. But a small, tropical minnow fish common to aquariums has given UCSD researchers a window for viewing live, human cancer cells in action. Working with transparent zebrafish to study one of the most aggressive forms of cancer, inflammatory breast cancer, has led to their discovery of how two proteins interact in the metastasis of breast cancer. The study led by Richard Klemke, Ph.D., professor of pathology at UCSD School of Medicine and the UCSD Moores Cancer Center, will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science online edition the week of October 22-26.
