| Title | Fungi Find Their Way into Cancer Tumors, but What They’re Doing There is a Mystery | |
| Date | Monday October 03 2022, @04:39PM | |
| Author | mrpg | |
| Topic | ||
| from the fungal-metropolis dept. | ||
Fungi find their way into cancer tumors, but what they're doing there is a mystery
Together, the studies provide a "nice, rigorous association" between fungi and cancer, said Ami Bhatt, an associate professor of medicine and genetics at Stanford University who did not work on either paper. "It provides pretty compelling evidence there may be rare fungi within tumors," she said. But the work raises far more questions than it answers. "Are they alive or not? And assuming they really are there, then why are they there? And how did they get there?"
[...] But once the fungi are there, if indeed they are alive and doing stuff, then what exactly are they doing? The experiments done thus far don't probe whether fungi in cancer are merely opportunistic bystanders or if they might be accomplices in cancer. "We don't have the experiments to present a causal link between tumor initiation or progression and fungi," she said. "But this really encourages future research to think about designing experiments with microbiome and mycobiome investigations in mind."
[...] Or, since the fungi rarely exist in the body without bacterial neighbors, perhaps there are interactions between fungi, bacteria, and the human body that drive cancer outcomes. "Fungi can be food for bacteria and vice versa," Livyatan said. "They can even live within bacteria or bacteria can live within fungi. They can do a lot of biochemistry. Any of those avenues might have an effect."
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printed from SoylentNews, Fungi Find Their Way into Cancer Tumors, but What They’re Doing There is a Mystery on 2024-05-07 23:37:29