Tumor Reversion Induced by Embryo and Oocyte Extracts

Abstract

The embryonic microenvironment can be viewed as a finely regulated network of cellular interactions that is critical to cell behaviour and fate determination throughout embryogenesis and beyond. Tumor cells are essentially “embryonic” in nature and for a while, it was believed that this phenomenon was peculiar to germ-cell tumors. In the last decades, further studies supported the hypothesis that even adult tumor placed into the embryo microenvironments can change its cell’s fate and this effect strongly depend to the “positional information” provided by the morphogenetic field. It is not surprising that embryonic morphogenetic fields induce a complete phenotypic reversion of tumor cells. Recently we observed that molecular factors extracted from Zebrafish embryos during specific developmental phases (20 somites) significantly antagonize proliferation of breast cancer cells, while reversing a number of prominent aspects of malignancy. Theoretical models have established a useful theoretical framework able to explain insights into the complex interactions taking place between cancer cells and morphogenetic fields, nevertheless a large research effort must be carried out in order to clarify the meaning “morphogenetic fields”, how morphogens gradients work and what are the molecular components acting on.