Veena Padmanaban’s Nature paper on sensory neurons and metastasis
publication
neuroscience
New work in Nature shows that sensory innervation drives breast cancer metastasis via neuropeptide signaling — opening a new axis of neural control over cancer progression.
Congratulations to Veena Padmanaban and the team on their Nature paper: Neuronal substance P drives metastasis through an extracellular RNA-TLR7 axis.
We have found that during breast cancer progression, primary tumors become increasingly innervated by sensory neurons. Cancer cells enhance the activity of these neurons, leading to the release of sensory neuropeptides that act back on the cancer cells to promote invasiveness and metastatic growth. Our current work investigates how cancer cells activate sensory neurons, how neuropeptides elicit pro-metastatic gene-expression programs, and how these neuro-cancer interactions evolve across tumor types.