Nerves
Tumours grow their own nerve supply and use it: adrenaline and acetylcholine signal growth, gliomas form synapses with neurons, and nerve invasion causes pain. Old drugs (beta blockers) are being retested.
Diagram
Pick a product above a diagram to see the nodes it hits and the escape routes below the block. Hover or tap any node or arrow for what it is; every node opens its target, glossary entry or the pathway page. Violet boxes are druggable targets.
A tumour that taps into the city's telephone lines: it receives growth orders from the nervous system, and brain tumours go further, plugging themselves into the switchboard so that ordinary brain chatter feeds them.
What happens
In plain words, then the glossary entries the stage rests on. Chapter 8, The tumour ecosystem: A tumour is a corrupted organ: cancer cells plus the fibroblasts, matrix, vessels, nerves, microbes and immune cells they recruit, and the signals they send to the rest of the body.
Tumours grow their own nerve supply and use it: adrenaline and acetylcholine signal growth, gliomas form synapses with neurons, and nerve invasion causes pain. Old drugs (beta blockers) are being retested.
Cancer neuroscience (nerve-tumour signalling). Cancer neuroscience is the study of how tumours talk to nerves. Nerves grow into tumours and feed them signals; brain tumours even wire themselves into neural circuits. Cutting the conversation with common drugs such as beta-blockers is now being tested.
The molecular players
The proteins and genes at this stage, with their role and how many products act on each. Listed players come from the atlas; drawn players sit as nodes in the diagrams above.
No target record is listed at this stage or drawn in its diagrams; the pathways above carry the mechanism.
Where medicines act
Products grouped by the node they hit, most advanced first, with the cancers an approved product is linked to. Pick one above the diagram to see it light up.
No product in the corpus acts on a target at this stage yet.
Open questions
What is not known at this stage: the atlas's own questions, the bottlenecks it bears on, and the ideas in the corpus that try to answer them.
- Do beta blockers improve survival in randomised trials?
- Can neuron-glioma synapses be blocked with epilepsy drugs?
Key evidence
Papers in the corpus tied to this stage's pathways, targets and terms, newest first.
- 2020observationalRoadmap for the Emerging Field of Cancer NeuroscienceCell
- 2019basicElectrical and synaptic integration of glioma into neural circuitsNature
src/data/mechanics-atlas.ts). Players, medicines, escape routes, tests, ideas and papers are resolved from the knowledge graph at build time through the stage's pathways, targets and terms, so every item here has its own page and sources. Where a section is missing, the corpus has no record tied to the stage yet. Nothing here is medical advice; see about and methodology. Stage 8.3 of 56.