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."
And this is useful, how? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Did you at least read the scientific paper, or did you base your conclusion on an article from the Globe and Mail?
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.
Contradict some other medical evidence (Score:2)
1. Difference between stages in cancer when observed in the microscope.
Earliest signs are that you see more cells dividing than usually expected for a given volume.
Early stages of cancer show normal cells, but in more quantity than expected.
Latter stages also show normal cells, but the overall structures between cells is lost.
Then you have cells that exhibit stranges features.
The more advanc
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Almost every cell of the human body can reproduce
A cancer is a group of cells reproducing in an abnormal fashion
A stem cell is a cell than can reproduce into a variety of different cells, eventually being able to become any type of human cell
Also I think this discovery is interesting from the point of view of the creation of stem cells for an adult. Stem cells may be used in some kind of treatment in the near future as I understand, but an adult body doesn't conta
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Holy crap, somebody spelled (and used) it correctly! Bravo!
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Consensus (Score:2)
For NBAB (not being a biologist) that sentence seems to have a lot of conviction. Where'd you learn it?
Perhaps this is the necessary duplicated research for this to start becoming a scientific consesus.
BTW, that integrating thing was cute, but would have been more technically correct if you had used "antidifferentiating" instead.
OT: Why was the p
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 re
Re:And this is useful, how? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
You're confusing "stem cell" and cell division (Score:2)
Typically biologists, upon discovering a cell they're interested in, "make it immortal" by what is somet
summary (Score:5, Interesting)
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IANAB but
Or, better, a marker compound (1) that would bond to a stem cell AND to a tumor cell if (when) they are close enough (immediately after cell divisio
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You may be using the term 'biased' in research/journalist form that I am unfarmiliar with. Im not sure the article is really biased on the concept -- but again, perhaps your meaning 'biased' in a nuanced way Im not appreciating. Anywho, hmm, near the bottom of the article:
a surgeon with Toronto's University Health Network, studied cells from the freshly removed colon tumours of 17 patients...From these,
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"Stem cells core of more cancers"
vs.
"Stem cells possible core of more cancers"
The results seem plausible but no competent scientist puts much weight on a single small study. It also uses emotion to boost the validity of the research
"A lot is known about the genetics of colon cancer, but despite all our knowledge, too many people keep relapsing and dying,"
A non biased article should use a neutral tone to convey information not drum up support for a r
Fundamental Flaw (Score:4, Funny)
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Yeah, in pussy chess. In girly chess you kill the king.
And in manly chess, you kill the loser. Suicides are common.
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A common practise in history.
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Four words (Score:2, Funny)
water boarding of course (Score:2)
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Here's exact quote:
"Seventy kings with their thumbs and big toes cut off have picked up scraps under my table."
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You make him continue his rule as if nothing happened, except that now, you're pulling the strings behind the scenes.
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But capturing the queen can be fun.
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I thought "check mate" came from the Persian "Shah Mat", which means "the King is dead".
Re:Fundamental Flaw (Score:5, Informative)
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It was always the common understanding this means "the king is disabled" or "king is incapacitated", or at worst "king is captured"... and never "king is dead" or anything like that.
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Stalemate is one type of a draw, It is more like you have a winner or a draw,
CC.
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Checkmate (frequently shortened to mate) is a situation in chess (and in other boardgames of the chaturanga family) in which one player's king is under attack and there is no way to meet that threat; it is a check from which there is no escape. The king is never actually captured -- the game ends as soon as the king is checkmated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkmate [wikipedia.org]
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Seems too basic to be noticed only now (Score:1)
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I knew it! (Score:2, Funny)
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In the same way we aren't allowed to use them to heal people, I guess we won't be allowed to kill them to stop cancer.
Time for "Equal time with right-wing fanatics"... (Score:1)
What kind of a society are we, if we murder cancer cells, just because they're "inconvenient" or "unwanted." Cancer is just God's way of saying that he wants more of you around to love!
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But the thing to remember is that there's really only a small hard-core of stem cells hiding in a huge mass of normal cells, with no real popular support. So what we should do is go in all guns blazing and take out as many of the healthy cells as we can in the cross-fire, then occupy the entire body and sell off its natural resources (dental fillings?) to Halliburton for no-bid contracts.
Furthermore, during our occupation we shou
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Well, the basic strategy they're pursuing involves creating and destroying new embryos. Say there's something wrong with your body, Alzheimer's. You need new stem cells to fix it, identical to your other healthy stem cells. So they'll take a cell out of your skin, create an embryo out of it by cloning, destroy the embryo (a shapeless ball of cells at this point), harvest its stem cells, and implant them into you.
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Yes, he sided with the group that would rather throw discarded embryos away (extras from fertility treatments, for example) as opposed to using them for medical research, with the consult of the "parents" of the embryo. That is such the ethical position. Death to the embryo anyway, but making sure that the embryo couldn't accidentally help someone on its way to death.
[Bush] also allo
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Possibly intuitive? (Score:5, Interesting)
fox is spinning so hard i'm dizzy (Score:5, Insightful)
So how long until we have some partisan halfwit wielding this nugget of information in his crusade against stem-cell research?
Re:fox is spinning so hard i'm dizzy (Score:5, Insightful)
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There, I fixed it for you.
Why don't we start harvesting organs from prisoners against their will, and carry out various risky medical research on the long-term prison population? At least then we would be consistent. It's sad when the average person can watch a movie such as The Island, and yet not see any parallels to the choi
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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.
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why? at the temperature at which they are kept, aren't they stateless? why should a week, year, decade, century matter? so long as the temp is a constant and allows no change? this is fact?
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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.
The only reason the "current controversey" is about embryos is that there has already been a fight over other sources. When
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My apologies for that. It can be hard to tell with people on the internet sometimes, and I came off as unnecessarily caustic there. However, there's a decent chance that someone viewing this thread might not have been aware of the precise differences between embryos and fetuses, so perhaps I helped someone out.
So, given where we are, is it wrong to not want to pay f
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Terrorist Stem Cells (Score:1)
Operation: Eradication (Score:5, Funny)
We must eradicate all embryos.
(We should probably eradicate all babies while we're at it, just to be safe.)
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The sad thing is that, with all our research being focused on treating its symptoms, we still don't have an effective treatment for the most widespread and lethal disease of all. We really need to get our act together and start focusing medical research where i
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They seem to think there are only two groups on this issue: those who are "pro choice" and those who are "pro life." But this ignores a huge number of Americans in the other group: pro abortion. Where are the media pundits who advocate encouraging the abortion process? We can't just leave them out of the abortion debate.
SciAm had article about this in July (Score:5, Interesting)
Stem Cells: The Real Culprits in Cancer? [sciam.com]
and here is the link to the full length article (Score:3, Informative)
Vitamine B17 (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Vitamine B17 (Score:4, Informative)
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Vitamin B17 = Laetrile, no evidence for efficacy (Score:3, Informative)
The wikipedia article linked previously also has a good summary.
Core of Cancer? (Score:4, Funny)
Easy answer.
Research me closer,
Tiny dancer.
Burma Shave
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KFG
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Known to cause cancer...since 1902! (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we should give credit where credit is due:
Note that we know in mice that blastomeres, put in the right environment, will multiply, organize and create trophoblastic cells (Many of the more promising lines of stem cells have been derived from blastocysts).
It is pretty uncanny that Beard nailed it pretty darn close in 1902, and he probably concluded that it was trophobastic cells because they couldn't get any deeper than that at the time.
transporter_ii
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...
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Lancet nails the cause of cancer in the US (Score:2)
From the Lancet:
"In many [western] countries, peoples' diet changed substantially in the second half of the twentieth century, generally with incre
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]
hmm, can't win? (Score:1)
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Aha! (Score:1, Funny)
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Obvious. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Obvious. (Score:4, Informative)
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not obvious (Score:2)
RE: I knew it! (Score:1)
I hope I'm wrong. I hope this has an effect similar to the election. It would be nice to see the Bush talking heads (any one of them) pop on screen touting the virtues of stem cell research in the fight against cancer.
cliche (Score:2, Funny)
Good reading on the subject (Score:2)
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While I do encourage slashdaughters to go to the library, you can also see the story on SciAm's website [sciam.com].
Fascinating paradigm shift (Score:2)
At the same time it makes almost perfect sense as a potentially important paradigm shift in how we think about cancer and, from the perspective of this article, how we treat cancers.
Essentially the way cancers were currently thought to function is that normal, differentiated cells some
Major chromosome damage (Score:2)
I also remember a discussion of cancer from someone at the U in biological sciences, the emphasis is that cancer cells are far from normal, not only mutated but rapid
Too Bad (Score:2)