Our bodies are made up of cells that can sense and respond to their dynamic environment. As an example, pancreatic beta cells chemically sense increased blood sugar concentrations and respond by producing insulin. Scientists have found that cells can also mechanically sense their environment; “mechanosensing” determines whether a cell should grow or die. Cancer is characterized by uncontrolled cellular growth, where cells often contain mutations that inhibit the natural mechanisms of cell death. Because mechanosensing is one such mechanism, scientists have hypothesized that cancer cells keep growing because they lack the ability to probe their environments. In this week’s paper, published in Nature Materials, an international research team led by Bo Yang and Michael Sheetz from the National University of Singapore investigated that hypothesis by combining tools from soft matter physics and biology.
How to turn off cancer cell growth using mechanosensing
