“That’s why shape characterization has been an important tool for diagnosis in cancer as well as in other conditions such as red blood cell disease or neurological disorders.” “Cell shape is determined by cell function, and loss of characteristic shape is associated with functional abnormality,” Sun said. Sun likens the cell shape analysis to determining whether a swimmer is doing the backstroke, breaststroke or butterfly based on the position swimmers put their body in and the movements they execute. Sun and collaborators in the OSU colleges of Science and Engineering used a type of artificial intelligence known as computer vision to track a cell’s migration program based on its shape computer vision derives information from digital photos, video and other visual inputs.įor this study, the scientists looked at cells from MDA-MB-23, a line of highly invasive breast cancer cells that’s commonly used in medical research. “Many cancer therapies that target a particular way a cell moves can fail to stop tumor metastasis in large part because cells switch to another available migration program,” he said. How well a cancer cell can change shape and shift travel modes plays a huge role in a cancer patient’s prognosis, Sun explains. In the case of a tumor, however, those migration programs are leveraged by cancer cells to sustain their invasion into tissue.” “In normal development and health-maintaining physiological processes such as wound healing, specific migration programs are executed when required.

“Through billions of years of evolution, cells have learned a number of distinct ways to migrate,” said OSU biophysicist Bo Sun, who led the study. The findings, published in Scientific Reports, are a key step toward understanding and preventing cancer metastasis, the internal spreading of the disease that’s responsible for 95% of all cancer deaths. – Oregon State University research has shed new light on the way malignant cells change their shape and migration techniques to invade different types of tissue.

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