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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		Looking into the bone microenvironment to learn about cancer
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:04
	Publish Date:		2016-07-23 19:00:00
	Description:		A lot of very aggressive forms of cancer seem to metastasize to the bone. Now, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and University of California campuses at Merced and Davis have joined forces to figure out what’s going on in the bone microenvironment between cancer cells and bone cells. Gabriela Loots, a biomedical scientist at the Livermore Lab, says they’re onto something. "There are certain molecules, for example, that once secreted by the bone they seem to create this environment that’s very attractive to the cancer cells to go there and to grow." Loots and her team are studying prostate cancer in particular because the aggressive form of the disease spreads primarily to the skeleton. They’ve identified a bone protein called Sclerostin, which had an inhibitory effect on prostate cancer invasion. "So, basically our next step now is really trying to understand how we can manipulate the environment of the tumor, so we can prevent it from forming bone metastases."
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