Don't ignore cuts, even minor ones can trigger a tumor

Mo natter how small it may be, don’t ignore a cut, for even a minor fissure could trigger a tumour, a new study has revealed.

An international team, led by Sunny Wong at University of California, has carried out the study and found a minor cut may be all which is needed to rouse dormant cancer cells into forming a tumour, the New Scientist reported.

To investigate how cancerous genetic mutations become tumours, researchers engineered mice to express a human cancer gene in hair follicle stem cells.

They then sliced a small patch of skin on some of the mice, while leaving the others unharmed. Only the wounded mice developed tumours, which were clustered around their injury, the findings revealed.

When skin is cut, hair-follicle stem cells migrate to the injury. The researchers say that pre-cancerous cells can lie dormant in the body until a trigger, such as radiation or a build up of mutations, pushes them into forming a tumour. “In this case, wounding got cancerous cells out of their resting phase,” Wong said.

Michael Kasper, who studies injury and cancer in the lungs at Dresden University of Technology in Germany, was impressed with the study. “This is a very nice, well-designed paper bringing more light into the striking relationship between processes of wound healing and cancer development,” he said. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science journal.

Several cancers are associated with injuries, such as Marjolin’s ulcer, a type of tumor that can develop after war injuries, but this is the first study to suggest injuries could be involved in the development of some skin cancers.

Jeremy Reiter, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco, said, over the past 10 years, more and more scientists have begun to think that cancers are wounds gone awry.”