Depending on where you started your research career, perhaps in the tissue culture laboratory, or producing a mouse model, or indeed in the clinic, your perception of which biological changes are important in tumorigenesis is probably skewed in a specific direction. Despite this, we can still overlook basic biological facts that were on our radars during college but have been forgotten amid the complexity of tumour biology and the specialization that research requires.
One good example is the effect that the stiffness of a given tissue has on the cells within the tissue, something that is addressed by Valerie Weaver and colleagues on page 108 of this issue. Cells respond to a variety of physiological mechanical stimuli by altering their shape, function or gene expression profiles. Such changes seem to be important in cancer biology — breast tumours are significantly stiffer than the normal surrounding breast tissue. Thus, understanding how cells sense mechanical changes in both normal and tumour tissue might identify new pathways that can be exploited in the clinic.
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