Medical Research Council's video: Cancer: the great cell corrupter - March 2022

During this talk, Professor Malanchi describes her research which seeks to understand how cancer cells interact with healthy cells in the body and corrupt them to support tumour growth. By understanding more about this process, researchers can identify new ways to tackle the disease in the future. The cells in each of our bodies work together to form highly specialised tissues and organs, following strict biological rules telling them how to behave. Cancer starts when cells break these rules. They start to misbehave and forget their correct role, growing out of control and spreading through the body (metastasising) to form secondary tumours. We now know that cancer cells do not act completely independently. Instead, they send out signals that corrupt the healthy cells around them, encouraging them to create an environment in which the cancer cells can thrive. As a result, tumours are made not just of cancer cells but also from a variety of abnormally behaving host cells, creating the condition for cancer growth.