The average survival rate for salivary gland cancer is 9%. Treating this type of cancer poses a major challenge for doctors, but the tumor itself is rarely the cause of death. Migrating tumor cells can also cause salivary gland cancer in other organs and tissuesForm metastasesand that is life-threatening. A team of researchers from the OU College of Medicine set out to determine why tumor cells migrate in the body and form metastases. The doctors have published the results of their study in the journal Gastroenterology.
Tumor cells not only form salivary gland cancer metastases very quickly. These often go unnoticed for a long time and can then hardly be treated. But now the research team has found a protein that transports zinc throughout the body. When levels of the ZIP4 protein increase, salivary gland tissue cells undergo malignant transformation. The newly formed tumor cells can then migrate to other organs and the immune system cannot detect them. This is because the tumor cells can change shape and slow their growth. The ability to change their shape and sometimes look like epithelial cells, sometimes like mesenchymal cells, is very important for the development of new therapeutic approaches. This is because chemotherapy can kill epithelial cells, but not mesenchymal cells.
If these tumor cells are not killed in time, they can enter the blood and travel to all important organs and parts of the body. In around 60% of patients with salivary gland cancer, metastases are discovered within 24 months after surgery to remove the large tumor. Life expectancy is then no more than eight months.
That's why it's very important that doctors continue to research the protein and its effect on tumor cells. Patients with other types of cancer can now be treated and the prognosis is often optimistic. Unfortunately, salivary gland cancer is still considered fatal and the life expectancy of patients has hardly increased in recent years. The research team wants to conduct further studies to possibly determine at what stage their growth and division can be stopped by chemotherapy.
