Physicists will complete the ultimate medical weapon to overcome cancer

The subtle mechanical structure between densely packed cells may help explain why some malignant tumors remain in place, while others rupture and spread throughout the body.

In 1995, when biomedicalist Peter Friedl was a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, he saw a strange phenomenon that prevented him from falling asleep for several nights. Several groups of synergistic cancer cells that he cultured in the instructor's lab began to move in the fiber web that mimics the gaps in the human cell.

For more than a century, scientists have known that a single cancer cell can leave the tumor and move through the blood and lymphatic system to distant parts of the body.

But no one has ever seen Friedel's view in the microscope: cancer cells are stacked in a dense formation to move together.

The discovery was so novel that it was difficult at first to publish the results. “The paper was rejected because of the lack of clarity regarding [metastatic cancer metastasis],” he said. Friedel and his co-authors finally published a short paper in Cancer Research.

However, 20 years later, biologists are increasingly convinced that although the cycle of single cells is rare, the cluster movement of tumor cells has led to many – and perhaps most – fatal cancer cell metastases. And cancer cell metastasis caused 90% of cancer deaths.

But it wasn't until 2013 that Friedel, who had taught at Radboud University in the Netherlands, really realized what he and his colleagues were seeing.

An article by Jeffrey Fredberg, a professor of bioengineering and physiology at Harvard University, inspired him.

Friedberg suggests that cells may be "blocked" - they are packed tightly, like a coffee bean stuck in a funnel, forming a unit. His research focused on lung cancer, but Friedel realized that the cancer cells he was observing that were spreading could also be blocked. He said: "I realized that our findings are exactly the same in both 3D and in motion... which makes me very excited, because this concept can be applied directly to our findings."

He quickly published the first few papers using the blocking theory to measure cancer cells.

For a long time, physics has provided doctors with many tools to fight against tumors, such as nuclear radiation and proton knives.

But until recently, it was only when someone actually suggested that the concept of pure physics might help to understand the biological nature of cancer.

In the past few years, physicists studying cancer cell metastasis have proposed very accurate predictive models for the behavior of some cells. Although such research has just started, optimistic advocates have begun to believe that a phase change in obstruction will play an increasingly important role in cancer treatment.

"The physics community has had a clear research momentum," Friedberg said. "If physicists are on board, biologists have to keep up with them. Cells must also obey the laws of physics - they have no choice about this."

Broadly speaking, before the advent of physics as an independent discipline, the principles of physics have been used in the cancer field. The ancient Greek doctor Hippocrates used the "crab" to name the cancer, because the tumor and its surrounding veins resembled crab crab shells and crab legs.

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