本期Nature Communications在线介绍了用来模拟癌细胞与非癌细胞之间界面的一个新的、更精确的方法。这一方法也许能够提升我们对肿瘤发展以及治疗干预措施疗效的认识。

癌症发展已被与基因表达的复杂变化联系了起来，在其中细胞的精确物理位置似乎也起一定作用——靠近癌细胞与正常细胞之间界面的细胞会与那些相距较远的细胞具有不同的基因表达特征。

Biju Parekkadan及同事建立了一个新系统，它使其能够将癌细胞和非癌细胞组织到截然不同的空间腔室中，然后采用基于显微镜的激光捕捉方法来将单个细胞解析出来，以进行分子分析。

采用他们的新方法，本文作者得以能够显示一种名为“reversine”的抗癌药物何以在那些物理上靠近癌细胞和正常细胞之间界面的细胞中有最强效应，该发现随后在用小鼠所做的试验中得到证实。这一模型有可能被用来揭示以相似方式发挥作用的其他药物的疗效以及对现有抗癌药物的治疗方案进行优化。

原文标题：Resolving cancer–stroma interfacial signalling and interventions with micropatterned tumour–stromal assays

原文摘要：Tumour–stromal interactions are a determining factor in cancer progression. In vivo, the interaction interface is associated with spatially resolved distributions of cancer and stromal phenotypes. Here, we establish a micropatterned tumour–stromal assay (μTSA) with laser capture microdissection to control the location of co-cultured cells and analyse bulk and interfacial tumour–stromal signalling in driving cancer progression. μTSA reveals a spatial distribution of phenotypes in concordance with human ​oestrogen receptor-positive (​ER+) breast cancer samples, and heterogeneous drug activity relative to the tumour–stroma interface. Specifically, an unknown mechanism of ​reversine is shown in targeting tumour–stromal interfacial interactions using ​ER+ MCF-7 breast cancer and bone marrow-derived stromal cells. Reversine suppresses MCF-7 tumour growth and bone metastasis in vivo by reducing tumour stromalization including collagen deposition and recruitment of activated stromal cells. This study advocates μTSA as a platform for studying tumour microenvironmental interactions and cancer field effects with applications in drug discovery and development.

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