Cancer Cells “Vomit” Waste: A Hidden Healing Shortcut
- When injured, cells have well-regulated responses to promote healing.
- Now,a new study in mice led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St.
- Published online in the journal Cell Reports, the study used a mouse model of stomach injury to provide new insights into how cells heal, or fail to heal,...
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Cathartocytosis: The Cellular “Purge” That Speeds Healing (and May Signal Cancer)
(Image: A compelling visual representing a cell ejecting debris – perhaps an artistic rendering or a microscopic image with annotations. Alt text: “Cathartocytosis: Cells ejecting waste to facilitate healing.”)
When injured, cells have well-regulated responses to promote healing. These include a long-studied self-destruction process that cleans up dead and damaged cells and also a more recently identified phenomenon that helps older cells revert to what appears to be a younger state to help grow back healthy tissue.
Now,a new study in mice led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Baylor College of Medicine reveals a previously unknown cellular purging process that may help injured cells revert to a stem cell-like state more rapidly. The investigators dubbed this newly discovered response cathartocytosis, taking from Greek root words that mean cellular cleansing.
Published online in the journal Cell Reports, the study used a mouse model of stomach injury to provide new insights into how cells heal, or fail to heal, in response to damage, such as from an infection or inflammatory disease.
“after an injury, the cell’s job is to repair that injury. But the cell’s mature cellular machinery for doing its normal job gets in the way,” said first author Jeffrey W. Brown, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology at WashU Medicine. “So, this cellular cleanse is a quick way of getting rid of that machinery so it can rapidly become a small, primitive cell capable of proliferating and repairing the injury. We identified this process in the GI tract, but we suspect it is indeed relevant in other tissues as well.”
Brown likened the process to a ”vomiting” or jettisoning of waste that essentially adds a shortcut,helping the cell declutter and focus on regrowing healthy tissues faster than it would be able to if it could only perform a gradual,controlled degradation of waste.
As with many shortcuts,this one has potential downsides: According to the investigators,cathartocytosis is fast but messy,which may help shed light on how injury responses can go wrong,especially in the setting of chronic injury. For example, ongoing cathartocytosis in response to an infection is a sign of chronic inflammation and recurring cell damage that is a breeding ground for cancer.In fact, the festering mess of ejected cellular waste that results from all that cathartocytosis may also be a way to identify or track cancer, according to the researchers.
A novel cellular process
The researchers identified cathartocytosis within an crucial regenerative injury response called paligenosis, which was first described in 2018 by the current study’s senior author, Jason C. Mills, MD, PhD. now at the Baylor College of Medicine, mills began this work while he was a faculty member in the Division of Gastroenterology at WashU Medicine and Brown was a postdoctoral researcher in his lab.
In paligenosis, injured cells shift away from their normal roles and undergo a reprogramming process to an immature state, behaving like rapidly dividing stem cells, as happens during advancement. Originally, the researchers assumed the decluttering of cellular machinery in preparation for this reprogramming happens entirely inside cellular compartments called lysosomes, where waste is digested in a slow and contained process.
From the start, though, the researchers noticed debris outside the cells. They initially dismissed this as minor, but the more external waste they saw in their early studies, the more Brown began to suspect that