“Cells’ Hidden Shortcut for Healing May Fuel Cancer”

The human body has an incredible ability to heal itself after injury or disease. When cells are damaged, they activate various responses to repair the damage and restore normal function. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Baylor College of Medicine have discovered a previously unknown cellular purging process that may help injured cells revert to a stem cell-like state more rapidly. This phenomenon, dubbed cathartocytosis, involves cells “vomiting” waste in a rapid and messy way, which can aid in healing but also has potential downsides.

Cathartocytosis is part of an important regenerative injury response called paligenosis, where injured cells shift away from their normal roles and undergo reprogramming to an immature state. In this process, mature cellular machinery gets in the way of healing, so a quick way of getting rid of that machinery becomes necessary. This cellular cleanse adds a shortcut, helping the cell declutter and focus on regrowing healthy tissues faster than it would be able to if it could only perform a gradual, controlled degradation of waste.

However, this process also comes with potential downsides. The tradeoff is additional waste products that can fuel inflammatory states, making chronic injuries harder to resolve and correlating with increased risk of cancer development. In fact, the festering mess of ejected cellular waste resulting from cathartocytosis may be a way to identify or track cancer.

Researchers suspect that cathartocytosis could play a role in perpetuating injury and inflammation in Helicobacter pylori infections in the gut. H. pylori is a type of bacteria known to infect and damage the stomach, causing ulcers and increasing the risk of stomach cancer. The findings also point to new treatment strategies for stomach cancer and perhaps other GI cancers.

If we have a better understanding of this process, we could develop ways to help encourage the healing response and perhaps, in the context of chronic injury, block the damaged cells undergoing chronic cathartocytosis from contributing to cancer formation.