How we classify cancer and spot it in its earliest stages could need an urgent rethink: researchers have found that even some healthy women carry cells with the key hallmarks of breast cancer.

These cells are known as aneuploid cells, and have an abnormal number of chromosomes. They’re common in invasive breast cancer, and it’s thought the chromosome imbalance enables cancer to spread and evade the body’s immune defenses.

Now it appears aneuploid cells might also be present even when there’s no cancer in sight. The researchers, from the University of Texas and the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, found them in breast tissue samples from 49 healthy women.

Learn the key differences between cancer cells vs normal cells, including growth patterns, structure, and behavior, and how they impact cancer progression.

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Whether cells in the human body survive or die under stress depends, among other things, on their mitochondria. Scientists at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Freiburg have now shown that a sudden stop in energy production in mitochondria prevents normal cell death or so-called apoptosis and instead triggers an inflammatory response. The results of this research were published in the journal Immunity.

“We found that mitochondria provide a kind of decision-making aid: they regulate whether a cell undergoes clean, silent apoptosis or releases pro-inflammatory messenger substances,” explains Prof. Dr. Olaf Groß, head of the study, a scientist at the Institute of Neuropathology at the Medical Center—University of Freiburg and a member of the Cluster of Excellence CIBSS—Center for Integrative Biological Signaling Studies at the University of Freiburg.

“This finding helps us to better understand how the body maintains a balance between cell protection and defense mechanisms. This could open up new avenues for the treatment of inflammatory diseases.”