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Transportable Cell Cultures
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15329 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1989 |
2,213 Words |
| Author
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Calvin Pierce
Calvin Pierce is a free-lance writer living in the Washington,
D.C., area. |
Cancer researchers face a dilemma--cancer cells are so adaptable and variable that they grow differently when they are inside the body than when they are in laboratory culture dishes. Obviously, it would be advantageous to understanding cancer cell growth if cancer cells could be monitored as they grow inside the body.
To study how cancer cells develop in the body of an animal, Paul Kraemer, a biologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and his associates have developed a method of growing cultured cancer cells in surgically implanted gelatin sponges and later retrieving the cells. This method of using a gelatin-sponge controllable arena for tumor growth helps to bridge the gap between the controlled, self-contained environment of a laboratory cell culture and the more complex biological setting of naturally occurring tumors.
Because cultured cells have been released from normal physiologic controls, they tend to undergo spontaneous transformation, so that new cell properties, such as the abilities to grow under unfavorable conditions and to grow indefinitely (immortalization), appear. Early in the neoplastic (or cancerous-growth) process, changes in the structure of chromosomes or in their number tend to occur.
Kraemer says that in order to study which of the novel characteristics are necessary for cultured cells to form progressive tumors in experimental animals, researchers need a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms that cause neoplastic growth. Kraemer and his associates hypothesize that chromosomal instability often is the primary cause of the uncontrolled growth of cancer cells. The Los Alamos investigators are searching for abnormal, "root-cause" genes that permanently disrupt the genetic stability of cancer cells, rendering them "hypermutable," so their descendants give rise to many variants of the original cell. "As cancer progresses, the tumor becomes dominated by increasingly aggressive cells," Kraemer says.
Scientists do not understand why cultured cells often spontaneously become tumorigenic after many growth cycles. However, Kraemer and other scientists believe that malignant cell growth may arise due to an underlying mechanism that disrupts the DNA in a cell's chromosomes and turns on various cancer-related genes, called oncogenes. "Oncogenes are certainly involved in cancer," says Kraemer, "but they don't really explain the process as a whole."
Using cell-culture
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