According to experts, a breakthrough in understanding how cancer spreads could lead to improved treatments.

Scientists have discovered that cancer cells ‘hijack’ a process employed by healthy cells to travel throughout the body, which fundamentally alters our understanding of the disease.

Despite being one of the leading causes of death in cancer patients, metastasis — the spread of cancer — remains very challenging to prevent.

This is largely due to the difficulty researchers have had identifying important drivers of this process that could be targeted by medicines.

Now, they have found that a protein known as NALCN may play a crucial role.

In mice tests, it was discovered that inhibiting the function of the NALCN protein induced metastasis.

They also discovered that removing the protein from cancer-free mice caused their healthy cells to leave their original tissue and travel to other organs, where they merged.

This shows that, contrary to what was previously believed, metastasis is a normal process employed by healthy cells that have been used by tumors to spread to other parts of the body.

Professor Richard Gilbertson, group leader for the study and head of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, stated, “These discoveries are among the most significant to emerge from my lab in the past three decades.

“Not only have we found one of the enigmatic drivers of metastasis, but we have also turned a generally held belief on its head by demonstrating how cancer hijacks healthy cell functions for its benefit.

If confirmed by additional research, this could have far-reaching consequences for preventing the spread of cancer and for manipulating this process to restore damaged organs.

NALCN stands for nonselective sodium (Na+) leak channel. Sodium leak channels are predominantly expressed in the central nervous system, although they are also present in the rest of the body.

These channels span cell membranes and regulate the quantity of salt that enters and exits the cell.

However, it remains unclear why these pathways appear to be so directly involved in cancer spreading.

Dr. Eric Rahrmann, the study’s principal investigator and a senior research associate at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute stated, ‘We are ecstatic to have identified a single protein that regulates not only how cancer spreads throughout the body independent of tumor growth, but also normal tissue cell shedding and repair.

We are gaining a better understanding of the pathways that govern the spread of cancer cells.

Now, we may explore whether there are potentially existing medications that could be repurposed to prevent this process from causing the spread of cancer in patients.