Overview
- A peer-reviewed Science paper reports that mechanical load in the heart slows cancer cell growth in mice and in lab-grown cardiac tissue.
- In a model that unloaded the organ by transplanting a donor heart into a mouse’s neck, tumors expanded far more than in the animal’s native beating heart.
- Beating engineered heart tissue resisted cancer cell expansion, while static tissue let cancer cells spread across the sample.
- The force sensor Nesprin-2 linked tissue strain to the nucleus by shifting chromatin structure and histone methylation to turn down genes for cell division.
- The work remains preclinical, yet it offers a testable path for mechanical-stimulation therapies and a possible reason primary heart tumors are found in under 1% of autopsies.