Are Friends (Bio)Electric?

A fascinating paper from 2018 contained an unusual description of cancer. From the perspective of a clinical outsider, it was unexpected to see what I'd always lazily thought of as a disease of the cell, portrayed more as a form of societal breakdown:

”...cancer is not a disease in the traditional sense of the word, but rather a social dysfunction within the community of the cells. The fact that it is a social dysfunction makes it fiendishly difficult to deal with because the other parts of the organism may not recognize the cancer for the damaging invader it is, and continue to respect their part of the contract, that of peaceful coexistence, until it is too late.”

Cancer as a Social Dysfunction—Why Cancer Research Needs New Thinking

All this raises numerous questions. How does healthy multi-cellular society within an organ breakdown, such that some cells forget their role and devolve towards the unicellular-focused, land-and-expand state we call cancer? How does a cell know what it is and where it belongs in the first place? Specifically, why does, say, a cell in the human breast, become a rapidly dividing and growing tumour, and how might we tell it to stop? 

Researchers in the lab of Professor Michael Levin at Tufts University have been exploring bioelectricity as a key mechanism regulating cellular society. Their language is also unfamiliar to the outsider, describing biology as scaled collective intelligence, from cells to organs to organisms to swarms. In their work, bioelectricity becomes what they call a cognitive glue - a means of communicating higher level collective knowledge down to individual constituents in the collective. Loss of this knowledge, forgetting what you are and where you belong, seems such a small thing at the level of a single cell, but builds into a vast human tragedy measured in millions of lives each year.

In 2021, Levin's group published on the relationship between Resting Membrane Potential (RMP) and metastatic disease in triple-negative breast cancer. Since RMP is influenced by potassium channel expression in the cell, the team theorised that already-existing potassium channel blockers might eventually be repurposed as a new class of cancer therapeutic. Of course, to successfully deploy new therapies requires building knowledge of new complexities, and later work discovered that RMP in breast cancer also varies by anatomical location of the tumour. While much work remains, when the complexities are fully mapped, we can hope for another effective weapon in the human armoury against cancer. And this weapon might not have to tease apart and act against individual aberrant cells, but could instead operate more broadly to maintain and restore healthy cellular society. For perhaps the first time, we might have a tool to prevent what researchers increasingly see as the dissociative identity disorder underpinning cancer mortality...