Stronger Together: Cancer Clones Cooperate to Alleviate Growth Barriers in Critical Cancer Progression Transitions

Hershey and colleagues recently showed how clones in a triple-negative breast cancer cell line cooperate for their mutual fitness benefit. In this system, clones exchange soluble metabolites to increase their in vitro growth rate at low population densities, therefore mitigating the documented growth barrier that reduces individual fitness in small tumor cell populations (Allee effect). Such cooperation could aid important transitions in cancer progression in which cancer cell populations are small, like invasion or metastasis. Using orthotopic transplantation, the authors demonstrate that this cooperation is functional in one such transition in vivo, increasing the metastatic load and number of metastases, which are usually polyclonal. Together, these findings highlight the need to consider ecologic interactions to properly understand tumor growth dynamics, and how they complement the standing evolutionary model of cancer progression in our quest to understand and treat cancer.