OF CANCER AND CODFISH

Hurricane Ridge, early on

This is a weird one.  The research summarized below was done at Cold Springs Laboratory,  Long Island.  More about that below.  The study is very far from complete – in fact, it might be characterized as a “Gee whiz!  Look at this!” sort of report.  To summarize:

There are these things called “neutrophils” that are part of the immune system.  They are white blood cells that help protect the body from harmful invaders; microbes of various sorts, principally.  They do so by extruding a thing called a “neutrophil extracellular trap (NET)”.  The NET is composed of DNA and enzymes of various (presumably lethal) sorts.  A diagram accompanying the article shows  what looks very much like a fisherman in a little round boat tossing out a net to catch a codfish.

So NETs are good, right?  Well, maybe not always.  The Cold Springs people find that some kinds of metastatic cancer come richly ornamented with NETs.  They speculate that the cancer cells somehow use the NETs to hide from the rest of the immune system.  More seems not to be known.  Much head-scratching is evident.  This is intriguing.  Stay tuned.

Cold Springs is an interesting place, at least to me.  In some of the reading I have done it comes across as a kind of summer camp for molecular biologists.  You know: work hard in the morning, go swimming or play volleyball in the afternoon, have a seminar after dinner, then sit on the porch and knock down a few as the sun sets over New Jersey.  Until recently it was supervised by Jim Watson (yes, that Watson) – until age and a lose tongue conspired against him.

But don’t get me wrong – Cold Springs is an important lab that does important work.  I wish I had played volley ball there.

https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2016/nets-metastasis?cid=eb_govdel