Exosomes: The cancer cell communication mechanism

Exosomes: The cancer cell communication mechanism

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Interview conducted by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.

Professor Deborah Goberdhan speaks to News-Medical about her team's latest research into cancer cells, and the mechanisms they use to communicate and adapt to stress.

What provoked your research into cancer cells and their communication?

I was unexpectedly provoked into cancer research during my doctoral studies, through the discovery of some remarkable tumor-like overgrowths in flies carrying an unidentified mutation.  The culprit turned out to be the fly equivalent of PTEN, which had just been identified as a major human tumor suppressor gene.

We showed that PTEN was lost in the enlarged cells contributing to these overgrowths and had a central role in growth factor signaling.  Our fly studies subsequently highlighted an amino acid-sensing mechanism as a means of selectively blocking cancer growth.  

One of the early goals of my new research group at Oxford was to determine how this mechanism worked in human cells.  These studies showed that cells sensed their environment by engulfing extracellular fluid through a process called endocytosis and then detecting nutrients, such as amino acids, from the surface of the resulting fluid-filled structures, termed endosomes and lysosomes.  

Meanwhile, I became interested in communication between cells through the serendipitous identification of exosomes in a fly gland.