Prostate Cancer’s Growth Aided by Nerves

A recent Baylor College of Medicine study indicates that prostate cancer spreads by attaching to nerves because they fuel the cancerous cells, not because it is the path of least resistance outside the gland, as once thought.

According to Gustavo Ayala, M.D., assistant professor of pathology, if prostate cancer remains in the prostate, it is less likely to develop further. It only progresses when it leaves the gland, and in 80 percent of cases it does that by wrapping around nerves.

Researchers found that about 15 genes were increased by more than threefold in the cancer cells wrapped around the nerve, as compared to the cancer cells away from the nerve. The genes involved were mostly regulators of cell death.

"This is an interactive relationship because the nerve is providing the cancer the fuel to keep growing," said Ayala, who also serves as a pathologist at The Methodist Hospital. "Understanding these specific mechanisms of this cancer-nerve interaction is key to developing therapies."

If cancer growth can be slowed down, then less aggressive cancers will be treated with fewer deaths, and treatment for faster spreading cancers will finally be obtainable, he said.

Ayala and his co-investigator, Thomas Wheeler, M.D., Baylor professor of pathology and associate chairman in The Methodist Hospital’s pathology department, found that placing a nerve from a mouse with prostate cancer cells in a petri dish caused both the nerve and the cancer cells to grow. Additionally, the nerve grew toward the cancer cell colony, indicating the nerves and cancer cells were feeding each other.

For more than three decades, scientists have believed cancer cells were wrapping around nerves and traveling through them because it was the path of least resistance through the prostate’s thick, fibrous covering.

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©2006 Texas Medical Center

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