Squeezing cancerous tumors may help find cure

Science News : Gautham Venugopalan, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, reports in a new study that applying pressure to lab-grown cancer cells forces them to behave like normal cells. Venugopalan and his coworkers believe that the phenomenon may have to do with the presence of a protein called E-cadherin. When they added antibodies that interfered with that protein, applying pressure to the tumors had no effect. Although the surprising finding doesn’t provide an immediate cure for cancer, it may point the way to the development of a drug to treat the disease. “You don’t necessarily have to kill a cancer cell,” Venugopalan said, “you just need to make it behave noncancerous.”