Rebel Cell by Kat Arney

Author:Kat Arney
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781950665518
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

7

EXPLORING PLANET CANCER

The view from up here is spectacular. Valleys and hills bursting with life, festooned with meandering rivers and bustling with a menagerie of curious creatures. Zoom out and it feels like you’re flying over a verdant rainforest. Look closely and you might be able to spot a small group of predators gathering together before they head off to hunt. This is the landscape of cancer.

My guide is Yinyin Yuan, a talented young Chinese computer scientist and group leader within the Center for Evolution and Cancer at the ICR in London. She’s using sophisticated image analysis algorithms to spy on the world inside a tumor, mapping out the ecological backdrop and the cellular species within it in exquisite detail. Yuan started her scientific life as a bioinformatician, sifting through reams of DNA sequencing data from cancer samples in the hope of understanding the genetic drivers of the disease. But she became disillusioned with the lack of detail about the organization and architecture within tumors. She didn’t just want to know about the shopping list of mutations that might be present in a chunk of tissue containing millions of cancer cells—she wanted to know where these cells were, how they were arranged, and what else might be in there, too.

In the rush to sequence as many cancer genomes as possible, we’ve forgotten that the tissues of the human body and the tumors that grow within it are a multitude of miniature habitats, each with its own characteristics. Viewed in this way, it’s obvious that genetically mixed-up cancer cells will adapt and evolve in different ways according to the environment in which they’re growing, just like species in the natural world.

Studying cancer genomes in a test tube of mashed-up tumor chunks—which contain healthy cells, immune cells, cancer cells, and more, all inhabiting their own ecological niches—reduces all this diversity to a flat beige territory bereft of any distinctive features. An ecologist wouldn’t go to the bottom of a valley and look at all the lush greenery growing alongside the river, climb two miles to the very top of a mountain to spy on tiny alpine heathers, and then draw a map of a flat plain with a height of half a mile where weeping willows and edelweiss grow side by side. It would be scientific nonsense, yet this is exactly how we’ve been studying cancer in recent years.

Pathologists have been peering down their microscopes at wafer-thin slices of tumors for more than a century. Even today, the standard way of diagnosing a cancer is to pop it under the lens and look at the cells. But unlike the race for ever faster and cheaper DNA sequencing of more and more cancer genomes, pathology has been left lagging. It’s only in the last few years that technology has advanced to the point where it’s possible to turn these images into the kind of detailed digitized data that Yuan wants to explore, analyzing the cells and conditions in situ within a tumor.

She pulls up a high-resolution microscopy image onto her screen.

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