Washington, October 1 : A team of researchers at IRB Barcelona have identified two special surface receptors that prevent the spread of colon cancer.

Eduard Batlle, ICREA researcher and head of IRB Barcelona’s Oncology Programme, says that the benign tumour cells called adenomas—the formation of which is the first step in the development of colon cancer—have special surface receptors called EphB2 and EphB3, which detect the presence of certain ligands in the healthy tissue that surround them.

He said that the two receptors and their ligands serve to organize the structure of intestinal tissue.

Batlle further said that the activity of EphB2 and EphB3 forced the tumour cells to “listen to” the signals that they receive from their environment. He said that such signals make the benign tumours grow in a confined space, from which they are unable to spread.

“We knew that these receptors worked as tumour suppressors, but we did not know how. Now we have been able to observe that they compartmentalize the tumour, thereby preventing its spread,” Nature Genetics quoted him as saying.

The researcher further said that the tumour cells could not invade other tissue outside the compartment unless they learnt to deactivate the special surface receptors.

“As the tumour cells progress to become malignant, their genetic programme is refined and they remove the signals that block their growth, including these two receptors, which impose positional information,” he said.

Batlle further said that experiments with animal models and in vitro cells had shown that the loss of function of the two receptors was one of the vital factors in the development of adenoma-derived colon cancer. (With inputs from ANI)