Award celebrates international collaboration that sparked landmark cancer discovery

Director of the Malaghan Institute, Professor Kjesten Wiig, says the award – the first of its kind – recognises the importance of collaboration in fundamental research in driving discoveries that advance human health. 

It has been more than a decade since Malaghan Professor Mike Berridge and Institute of Biotechnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences Prof Neuzil made the ground-breaking discovery that mitochondria can travel between healthy and cancerous cells, a discovery that has had far-reaching implications in the field of cancer research and cell biology.

Known as horizontal mitochondrial transfer, the discovery not only sparked a brand new field of biological research, it also kicked-off a decades-long collaboration between Prof Berridge and Prof Neuzil.

“Our team at the Malaghan had made the startling observation that in an aggressive melanoma model, cancer cells without mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) could form tumours,” Prof Berridge explains.

“That in itself was significant – mitochondria are an essential component of any living cell, so for cancer cells to be able to grow without their mtDNA, they must have been getting energy from an unknown source.” 

However, given cancer cells are adept at finding alternate ways to generate energy, it wasn’t immediately apparent that these cancer cells were gaining donor mitochondria from their surroundings. It wasn’t until Prof Berridge presented his findings at a conference where Prof Neuzil was in attendance, that the gears began turning. A conference delegate questioned whether we really had successfully removed all the mtDNA from the cancer cells, as a single residual mitochondrial genome could explain the results we presented.” 

Curious, Prof Berridge returned to Wellington and soon showed something remarkable: The melanoma cells they were studying had acquired mtDNA from their host. The genetic material from one cell had been transferred to another.

“We extended this research to a breast cancer model with similar results that were reproducible.”

Like many new discoveries, Prof Berridge’s work was met with initial scepticism. Attempts to publish the results in high impact journals failed, primarily because the long-standing dogma that genes do not move between cells in the body was being challenged. Prof Berridge and his team needed more evidence to cross this threshold.

“We presented these new results at a Society for Free Radical Research Australasia meeting in Akaroa December 2010 that Jiri attended. He was blown away by our results and after the conference, we met and agreed to collaborate to build on the science.”

Five years later, the collaborative efforts of Prof Berridge’s team at the Malaghan and Prof Neuzil’s teams at Griffith University in Queensland and at the Institute of Biotechnology in Prague, their findings – that mitochondria can travel between healthy and cancerous cells – were published in Cell Metabolism in January 2015.

Now, more than a decade on from that initial publication, the relationship between Prof Berridge and Prof Neuzil has only deepened as they’ve continued their research into horizontal mitochondrial transfer and the implications of their discovery – with 23 further joint publications, many in high impact journals.

“Horizontal mitochondrial transfer is now recognised as a basic cellular function that occurs not only between cancer and non-cancerous cells, but as a fundamental physiological phenomenon in non-cancer diseases, in normal physiology, and during development and ageing,” says Prof Berridge.