Contributor: Cellular Research Offers New Opportunities in Our Battle Against Cancer

Cancer is one of society's most pressing problems. Naturally, we tend to view this disease from the perspective of its enormous human toll. However, cancer is ubiquitous in nature and common to most animals, although less so in plants and fungi. Only a few multicellular organisms are known to be highly cancer resistant, such as the naked mole rat or sharks.

The common biological denominator underlying the commonality of cancer is that all planetary life is cellular, and cancer is a cell-based process. Consequently, the dynamics of cell-cell interactions are the epicenter of the development and progression of all cancers and, naturally, must be the focus of research to suppress or eradicate them. Fortunately, 2 relatively recent uncovered attributes of cellular life can lead to a significant boost in our cancer armamentarium.

First, it is now understood that all multicellular organisms we can see with our eyes are superorganisms, now called holobionts. Each of us is a vast collection of personal body cells and an immense, partnering microbiome. Secondly, all cells are intelligent at their scale. Pertinently, this means that cellular microbes are also intelligent, and importantly, so are cancer cells. Much can be gained by discussing cancer within the framework of intelligent cells and dissecting their dynamic interrelationships. Doing so emphasizes that cancer cells must now be considered competent, problem-solving agents rather than bioactive automatons. Significantly, one of the ways that cancer solves problems is by skillful partnering with our obligatory microbial companions.

Although the holobiont concept and our understanding that cells are intelligent are not new ideas, many physicians are still little aware of these realities and their ramifications get little attention, even in academia. Consequently, there is a general misapprehension about cancer dynamics since there is no specific focus on the cognitive capacities of all cells. Research demonstrates that all cells individually sense their environments, communicate abundantly, have retrievable and deployable memory, anticipate, predict, measure variables, trade resources, and are highly social. All these cellular faculties are exerted to problem solve and protect the integrity of individual cells. Cells act collectively since this is their path to better problem-solving.

When cells act together, it is an instance of natural cellular engineering. The term engineering is by no means misplaced here. A common definition of engineering is “the action of working artfully to bring something about.” Collective cellular action qualifies as engineering since each cell is a competent, self-directed, problem-solving agent. What are cells engineering? You. This is the process by which your body tissues are formed, which, in ecological terms, is called niche construction. This latter process is the continuous modification of the environment by the collective action of organisms at any scale to create a conducive habit. Cells do the same thing. They collaborate in their billions and trillions to enact niche constructions representing the tissue ecologies that comprise all of your body parts. Notably, this type of collaborative action also includes participants from the constituent microbiome of every body part.

Until recently, many believed that aside from certain inner passages, such as your gut, mouth, or upper airways, all other parts of our bodies were sterile. Instead, research proves that each body part and every organ system has its own microbial constituents. Naturally, the gut microbiome is enormously greater in number than in your pancreas. However, the pancreas does have its own small microbiome that participates in pancreatic cellular functions—although those pathways are, as yet, little explored. However, importantly, it is now known that a crucial breakdown in that pancreatic microbiome is a definable feature of pancreatic cancer. Research has confirmed that the invasion of pancreatic ducts by fungus triggers a pancreatic dysbiosis that is part of cancer induction.

With this new background, fresh opportunities present to approach cancer differently than in the past. The crucial difference is that once cells are acknowledged as intelligent agents that can measure environmental cues and can communicate with others, it follows that cells can engineer. Cancer is alternative cellular engineering. Consequently, cancer can now be studied from the perspective of co-engineering between cancer cells and their microbial partners in competition with normal cellular engineering. Instead of being typical cooperative, co-engineering participants, cancer cells are rogue partners, representing an alternative self-identity, capable of deceptions that enable them to steal resources from normal cellular ecologies.

Notice that we have not mentioned genes, cell toxicities, or cellular selection. Each of these have been the mainstays of cancer therapy. Instead, a novel focus can be placed on cell-cell communication and how this shifts the trading of cellular resources.

Newer immunotherapeutic treatments are pointing the way toward a greater understanding of suppressing and preventing cancer. Immune treatments are examples of capitalizing on cell-cell signaling and the cellular dynamics that relate to the interplay between cell-recognition systems integral to cellular engineering. Crucially, the same dynamics that enable cells to construct the tissue ecologies that make us are precisely the same general processes that enable cancer.

A team of scientists at Cambridge University has just announced a breakthrough study on how metastasis spreads. Working with mice, these scientists have discovered that blocking a specific protein's activity, NALCN (sodium Na+ leak channel, nonselective), triggers cancer metastasis. Surprising to them, this “metastatic” process is not seen just in cancer. When they removed the blocker protein from normal mice, they found that healthy cells migrate freely from their original site and take up residence elsewhere, even in different organs. For example, normal pancreas cells will migrate to the kidneys and transform into healthy kidney cells. This cell migration is not an abnormal process. Instead, this is part of the complex co-engineering dynamics among trillions of cells that enable the vast connectome that constitutes holobionic life.

This unexpected finding suggests that stopping metastasis is more than searching for new cellular toxins or looking for genetic markers. The more advantaged path travels through the focused study of cell membranes and their crucial transmembrane channels that govern cell-cell communications, such as NALCN sodium ions. So, while cancer hijacks normal cellular resources, it does so by utilizing the basic processes of cell-cell communication and natural cellular engineering that sustains our lives and health.