Studying cancers in three dimensions has revealed a kind of regression, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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As cancer cells grow, a study looking at their three dimensional architecture reveals that they become more like cells normally seen in fetal life. Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson says that may be the key to enabling them to metastasize throughout the body.

Nelson: Particularly as the metastatic process occurs the cancer cells appear to adopt a more fetal kind of configuration in terms of the way the cell programs what genes it's going to use. As it gets nastier it gets a little bit less differentiated a little bit more infantile in that process, it can adopt a number of different states and this pliability or plasticity may be one of the reasons it can so readily adapt to growing in the wrong place, like in the liver or the lung as a metastasis.         :31

Such observations provide targets for strategies to treat and ultimately cure the disease, Nelson says. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.