When cancer spreads to the brain, treatment options fall off. Most of the drugs designed to target metastases do not cross the blood-brain barrier or are ineffective at treating brain metastases.
To understand the molecular processes that influence how cancer cells pass through the blood-brain barrier, researchers used two microfluidic chips that mapped cancer cell migration to the brain and looked at what was happening in the blood-brain niche. Results are published in the journal Advanced NanoBiomed Research.
Using breast cancer cell lines, they found that Dkk-1, a cytokine released by the astrocytes, triggers the cancer cells to migrate. Dkk-1 is known to play a role in in Wnt signaling, a key signaling pathway linked to cancer progression.
