Understanding how childhood cancers spread

Childhood cancer is what happens when cells develop wrong. Cancer cells grow faster than normal cells and often invade the tissue around the tumour, like muscles and blood vessels. Normal cells can’t do this, partly because of the extracellular matrix (ECM). The ECM is like a scaffold that holds cells in their proper place and organises them into tissues. This is why some organs are solid (the kidneys and liver) and some organs are hollow or spongy (the lungs and brain). The ECM also stops normal cells from growing too much.

However, cancer cells have found ways of altering or breaking the scaffold in order to grow out of these boundaries. This allows them to spread into the bloodstream and lymph channels. Once the tumour cells reach a new home in the body, such as the lungs or bone marrow, they alter the scaffold again so they can grow in their new environment.

In this project, Dr Madhumita Dandapani and her team at the University of Nottingham will look at the building blocks of the ECM scaffold. They plan to focus on a type of building block called glycosaminoglycans (GAGs). These are hard to study, but the team has already developed a new imaging method to help them understand the structure of GAGs within the scaffold. 

Dr Dandapani’s early data shows that GAGs are different in some types of childhood cancer. This project will gather more data about the scaffold’s composition in different types of healthy tissues, such as the liver, kidneys and brain, and explore how this is altered in cancer.

Understanding how the scaffold breaks could show how cancer spreads, helping researchers prevent this. This research addresses some of the top priorities in childhood cancer research - understanding why children get cancer and how cancer relapses. Dr Dandapani hopes that her work may one day lead to new treatments for these cancers.