Multinucleated cells: The frightening similarities between cancer and slime mold

Some cancer cells merge together to form a large bag of cytoplasm enclosing a bunch of nuclei (multinucleated giant cells). In many cases, it is these multinucleated giant cells that give rise to resistant metastatic cancer cells. This phenomenon is also found in the amoeba cells of slime molds that join together to form a swarming one-cell organism of thousands of nuclei (1, 2). In fact, many of the features of an amoeba cell of a slime mold organism (such as migration, budding of daughter cells, learning to avoid toxins, etc) are the same as those of metastatic cancer cells. In this article, I will describe both entities - multinucleated cells in cancer and multinucleated cells in amoeba (or slime mold).