It’s not every day that researchers discover a new organ – one that might be implicated in how cancer spreads.
A newly discovered network of fluid-filled channels in the human body may be a previously-unknown organ, and it seems to help transport cancer cells around the body…
This organ was likely never seen before because standard approaches for processing and visualising human tissue causes the channels to drain, and the collagen fibres that give the network its structure to collapse in on themselves…
When Theise’s team looked at samples taken from people with invasive cancers, they found evidence that cancer cells that had worked their way out of their original tissues could find their way into these channels, which took them directly to the lymphatic system.