Stem Cells At The Core of Cancer? 159
davecb writes "The Globe and Mail reports that cancers have at their core a small number of stem cells, without which they cannot spread or reoccur.
From the article: 'A spate of new discoveries about the basic biology of cancer is pushing researchers toward an astonishing conclusion: For decades, efforts to cure the disease may have targeted the wrong cells.' If true, the discoveries of Canadian and Italian research groups may give us a new
path to selectively attack cancer."
Vitamine B17 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fundamental Flaw (Score:1, Informative)
But capturing the queen can be fun.
Re:And this is useful, how? (Score:4, Informative)
This is the statement that's currently being debated; it's been basically assumed for a number of years that cancer was a differentiated cell that suddenly regained the ability to divide; the field is now warming to the idea that instead of cancer starting with a differentiated cell, it starts when a stem cell loses the control mechanisms that tell it "stop dividing now / divide slower". The mechanistic idea is the same (loses checkpoints, overexpressed growth factors, etc etc), but if it is truly only the stem cells that cause cancers, it's both interesting for a cancer treatment perspective (you don't have to target the entire cancer, just target the stem-like cancer cells), but also important for a stem cell therapy perspective, since it's a bad idea to inject people with stem cells primed for growth if they're going to have a massive risk of becoming cancerous.
and here is the link to the full length article (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Fundamental Flaw (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Vitamine B17 (Score:4, Informative)
Often, but now always. (Score:3, Informative)
There are various degrees of "de-differentiation" (which means that the cancer cell loses the properties of the cells that make up the tissue it originally came from, like receptors). The worst case is turning into something completely unrecognizable. The more similarity to the original the cancer cells retain, the better is the outlook for treatment, because the cancer cells might still respond to certain signals (for example hormones) that slow down its rate of division.
Vitamin B17 = Laetrile, no evidence for efficacy (Score:3, Informative)
The wikipedia article linked previously also has a good summary.
Forbes.com - Cancer Killer article (good read) (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2004/1227/070.ht [forbes.com] ml [forbes.com]
Cancer Killer
Radical researchers are onto a controversial idea for stopping cancer: go after stem cells
Peter Dirks uses a talented pair of hands to cut cancer out of the brains of sick children. But no matter how brilliantly he performs, he rarely is able to stop cancer's return; sometimes the tumors come roaring back just months after he excises all visible signs of disease.
This inevitability--of children dying in the face of his best attempts to heal them--got to him. "It broke my heart that we couldn't do more for them," says Dirks, a surgeon-scientist at the University of Toronto-affiliated Hospital for Sick Children. So in desperation he set out six years ago to pursue a radical new theory of what truly fuels cancer's growth, one that might unlock new therapies and explain why today's treatments often provide only fleeting help.
His concept was so fringy that government agencies repeatedly rejected his grant proposals. Parents of several of his patients kept the research going by donating $100,000 to his efforts; one of the couples even took up a collection at their child's funeral. But this fall Dirks reported a breakthrough that could dramatically alter our understanding of how cancer grows. His revelation, which could take a decade or more to take hold, is the latest in a string of findings that may one day uncloak the key triggers of many different kinds of cancer.
Scientists have long assumed that all of the dozens of kinds of cells inside a tumor are created equal--and are equally deadly, capable of spreading elsewhere in the body to create a totally new tumor. So they focus on chemotherapy that kills as many cancer cells as possible.
Dirks and a handful of other mavericks argue that this indiscriminate approach is wrongheaded. They believe a single type of cell may be cancer's main growth engine:mutant stem cells that, though barely present, spawn other cells that then spark growth. "This has profound implications," says researcher Thomas Look of Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. "The major cells you see under a microscope may not be the ones you need to kill in order to cure the disease." He adds that the theory "is definitely still very controversial" in some quarters.
Figure out a way to isolate these mutant cells and target only them, Dirks says, and maybe cancer can be stopped outright--and the kids he treats might stop dying so soon after he operates.
These mutant stem cells already have been found in breast cancer, two types of leukemia and multiple myeloma. This fall Dirks and six scientists at the University of Toronto proved the existence of the cells in human brain tumors, pinpointing a small group of cells believed to be the driver of the tumors' growth. "In every brain tumor we have looked at, in both adults and kids, we are able to find these cells," Dirks says.
When the researchers implanted just a couple hundred of these cells into mice, they developed huge tumors and often died within weeks. Other brain cancer cells, by contrast, were incapable of forming new tumors, no matter how many were injected into the mice, Dirks wrote last month in the journal Nature. The more stem cells present, the more virulently the tumor grows:They account for 1 in 4 cells in a glioblastoma tumor, the deadliest type of brain cancer, but only 1 in 500 cells in slower-growing forms of brain cancer, Dirks found.
Some researchers predict that stem cells eventually will be found in most major types of cancer. "It will completely change the search for new treatments and the way we think about the disease," says Irving Weissman, a renowned stem cell expert at Stanford University, who says several big drug firms have taken an interest in the latest findings.
Stem cells are the primitive
Re: Trophoblast Thesis Of Cancer? (Score:4, Informative)
And what was Beard's Trophoblastic Thesis Of Cancer?
This lead some to say that cancer, rather than being an invasion of mutated cells, was more correctly an "over-healing" situation in the body (admittedly, that is an oversimplification). But there are many that think this is one reason why cancer so easily evades the immune system, which would under normal conditions kill off anything foreign to the body fairly quickly...
Transporter_ii
Reminds me of Eva Vertes' TEDtalk (Score:2, Informative)
The video is available at the TEDTalks webpage. Look for Eva Vertes.
http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/ [ted.com]
Re:fox is spinning so hard i'm dizzy (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't know what embryo means, here's a helpful link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryo#Growth_of_the
Secondly, most of the controversy that I'm aware of right now does not involve taking stem cells from aborted fetuses, or aborted embryos. It involves taking embryos that were already created and frozen in a lab for in vitro fertilization, but never used. If these embryos are not implanted in a womb within a certain amount of time, even frozen, they stop being viable. Furthermore, most in vitro clinics destroy the unwanted embryos after the couple has successfully conceived. Right now, these embryos are just being destroyed, but instead, they could be use to cure people! However, people like you go around spreading misinformation designed to rile up people's emotions, to the point where they forget what the issue is even about.
Re:Obvious. (Score:4, Informative)
Stem Cell Research (Score:1, Informative)
Re:And this is useful, how? (Score:4, Informative)
The cancer cells are still the same type of cell they were before they became cancerous. For example, in skin cancer, the cancerous cells are still skin cells. This has been noted when metastasis occurs.