What if cancer is triggered by changes outside the cell?

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By Kara Platoni

December 12, 2007

Mutation does not always mean cancer. If you sampled cells from any woman's breast, Dr. Mina Bissell says, you would find a scattering of premalignant or even malignant cells. Despite these mutations, in seven out of eight women, those cells would be sitting there quietly, not causing trouble. Yet in the eighth woman, a few cells would progress to cancer. Why?

The answer, Bissell thinks, has to do with the very architecture of our bodies' organs.

The reason our internal organs aren't gelatinous blobs is because the cells sit on a latticework structure called the extracellular matrix. For years, researchers thought that the matrix was not much more than scaffolding. But Bissell's research has shown that this superstructure is actually in constant two-way communication with the cell's DNA, telling it both where it is, and how to behave as part of the larger tissue. In return, the matrix is modified by the genome. It is a prodigious idea: that the cell knows its function because of its orientation within a complicated 3-D architecture. "The structure is the message," she says.

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