High-frequency ultrasound microbeam induced calcium elevations in cancer cells: Discrimination between invasive and non-invasive breast cancer cells

Breast cancer is the leading cancer in women. One of the most devastating events for the breast cancer patient is the transformation of a tumor from an indolent to an invasive state, which portends widespread metastasis. Thus, determination of the invasiveness of cancer tissues would be crucial to decide the aggressiveness of therapy. Our recent findings showed that invasive breast cancer cells, but not noninvasive breast cancer cells, express many neuron-like traits due to specific gene, thus enabling higher expression of ion channels that allow calcium ions (Ca²⁺) to enter cells. Therefore, in this paper, we tested whether high frequency ultrasound microbeam stimulates transient cytoplasmic Ca²⁺ elevation preferentially in highly-invasive, but not weakly-invasive breast cancer cells, demonstrating the potential of high frequency ultrasound microbeam stimulation (HFUMS) for discrimination between invasive and weakly-invasive cancer cells.