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Mitochondria (artificially coloured) are swapped between cells, contrary to an earlier dogma that they stayed with their cells of origin. Credit: K.R. Porter/SPL
Cancer cells can poison attacking immune cells by filling them with defective mitochondria ― dampening the body’s defensive forces and helping the tumour to evade eradication1.
These findings, published today in Nature, provide the strongest evidence to date that mitochondria, cellular sub-structures that produce energy, migrate in humans and not just in cell and animal models.
“My first thought was that this sounds crazy, like science fiction. But they seem to have the data for it,” says Holden Maecker, an immunologist at Stanford University in California, who was not involved in the research. “This is potentially a totally new biology that we were not looking at.”
Scientists once thought that each cell’s mitochondria were made by that cell itself, but researchers are increasingly finding that mitochondria can move from one cell to another. In the Petri dish, for example, cancer cells have been found to feed their insatiable appetite for energy by stealing healthy mitochondria from immune cells called T cells2.