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Under the Radar

Combating cancer’s conversations

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Combating cancer’s conversations

(Copyright: Eshel Ben-Jacob and Kinneret Ben Knaan)

Scientists believe we have a better chance of tackling the disease by knowing what tumour cells are saying to one another and then cutting off communications.



Some of these ideas are controversial, but others are undeniable. One of the classic examples of a single-celled co-operator, the soil-dwelling slime mould Dictyostelium discoideum, survives a lack of warmth or moisture by sending out pulses of a chemical from cells, which attracts other cells to move towards them and clump together into multi-celled bodies that look like weird mushrooms. Some of these cells become spores, entering into a kind of suspended animation until conditions improve.

Many bacteria can engage in similar feats of communication and coordination, which can produce complex colony shapes such as vortex-like circulating blobs or exotic branching patterns. These displays of “social intelligence” help the colonies survive adversity, sometimes to our cost. Biofilms, for example – robust, slimy surface coatings that harbour bacteria and can spread infection in hospitals – are manufactured through the co-operation of several different species.

But as cyberwarfare experts know, disrupting communications can be deadly, and the same social intelligence that helps bacteria thrive can be manipulated to attack pathogenic varieties. Some strategies for tackling dangerous bacteria now target their cell-to-cell communications, for example by introducing false signals that might induce cells to eat one another or to dissolve biofilms. So it pays to know what they’re saying to one another.

Ben-Jacob, along with Donald Coffey of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore and “biological physicist” Herbert Levine of Rice University in Houston, Texas, think that we should be approaching cancer therapy this way too: not by aiming to kill off tumour cells with lethal doses of poisons or radiation, but by interrupting their conversations.

Cracking codes

There are several indications that cancer cells thrive by co-operating. One trick that bacteria use for invading new territory, including other organisms, is to use a mode of cell-to-cell communication called quorum sensing to determine how densely populated their colony is: above a certain threshold, they might have sufficient strength in numbers to form biofilms, or infect a host. Researchers have suggested that this process is similar to the way cancer cells spread during metastasis. Others think that group behaviour of cancer cells might explain why they can become so quickly resistant to drugs.

Cancer cells are very different from bacteria: they are rogue human cells, which have a separate compartment for the genetic material, and are generally deemed a more advanced type of cell than “primitive” bacteria, in which the chromosomes are just mixed up with everything else. Yet it’s been suggested that, when our cells turn cancerous and the normal processes regulating their growth break down, more primitive “single-celled” styles of behaviour are unleashed.


Cancer cells resistant to drugs can and do emerge at random by natural selection in a population. But they may also have tricks that speed up mutation and boost the chances of resistant strains appearing. And they seem able to generate dormant, spore-like forms, as Dictyostelium discoideum does, that produce “time-bomb” relapses even after cancer traces have disappeared in scans and blood tests.



The “warfare” analogy in cancer treatment is widely overplayed and potentially misleading, but in this case it has some value. It is often said that the nature of war has changed over the past several decades: it’s no longer about armies, superior firepower, and battlefield strategy, but about grappling with a more diffuse foe – indeed one loosely organized into “cells” – by identifying and undermining channels of recruitment, communication and interaction. If it means anything to talk of a “war on cancer”, then perhaps here too we need to think about warfare in this new way. 


