Tumor Microenvironment

Hi Steemians!

I decided to post something I´m working on as a scientist. If you´ve never heard of Tumor Microenvironment, I´ll get you a little closer.
All of you know that cancer is one of the leading cause of death worldwide and scientifists are still trying to figure out how to completely cure cancer.
Today´s chemotherapy works on mechanism that all fast-growing cells are killed by using chemotherapy. It means that all cells that have the ability to grow very fast, including cancer cells, are killed by today´s anticancer drugs. But not only cancer cells have this ability, many others have! And because of it, there are many adverse effects of chemotherapy. Other fast-growing cells are for example blood cells, forming in the bone marrow, cells in the digestive tract or hair follicles.
So people who are sufering from cancer and who´re undergoing chemotherapy have to dealing with side effects of chemotherapy and radiation such as hair loss, lack of energy, appetite change, infections, fetigue and more.

Avoiding these adverse effects could be achieved if we discovered different mechanism of their action. And that´s why I´m focusing on Tumor Microenvironment.
Tumor Microenvironment is a big a complex of cancer and non-cancer cells. So we´re not focusing only on cancer cells but also on non-cancer cells which play very important role in cancer.
HOW? Non-cancer cells are able to affect cancer cells in a negative way. They can get a different phenotype and can then force cancer cells to growth and multiply.
Tumor microenvironment is also characterized by abnormalities like hypoxia, which means that it doesn´t get enough oxygen. As oxygen is formed by blood vessels, whole Tumor microenvironment starts to forming new bloond vessels to produce oxygen.
When I attended University of Pharmacy I did a research about potencial anticancer effect of some chemical substances. I discovered they can inhibit the grow of blood vessels. When tumor doesn´t have blood vessels, it doesn´t have oxygen as well, so he "can´t live".

You can see it on the picture, that blood vessels in the picture on the right are much thinner and they stoped to growth.
I know it´s not an amazing discovery, but at least we´ve found there´s another way how to treat patients who´re suffering from cancer. Only more discoveries are needed :)
Tumor Microenvironment is my next target in my research.
Hope you like my post and maybe you learned something new.
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