Stem Cells At The Core of Cancer?

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."

Comments

And this is useful, how?

[L4m3rthanyou]

Cancer cells typically mutate in such a way that they reproduce uncontrollably. Often, this coincides with the original cancer cell "de-differentiating" (integrating? :) ) into a sort of stem cell, which allows them to reproduce infinitely. So yes, it would be understandable that a stem cell would have stem cells at its core. IANAB (I am not a biologist), but this sounds like redundant information to me, at least to some extent. What took them so long to figure this out? And, aren't all tumor cells pretty much the same (you know, that whole infinite replication thing)?

Re:And this is useful, how?

[fupeg]

You didn't RTFA, did you? (Yeah I know, it's Slashdot. Clearly the people who modded you didn't RTFA either.) From TFA:

current therapies treat colon cancer as a "homogeneous entity, not every colon cancer cell has the ability to keep that tumour going; only one in 60,000."

summary

[Xiph]

Anyone answering above this post have not have time to read the article, here's the summary: The article is about research into whether or not cancerous stemcells are necessary for cancer growth. It discusses (biased) that they are, and talks briefly about where in the body you'll find stem cells and what they do. then finishes of with presenting a (in my non-medical view) convincing animal study, showing that when cancer cells are injected into mice, it was predominantly the mice who were injected with cancerous stem cells which showed cancer growth, while only one mouse (in 47) injected with cancerous non-stem cells showed a growing cancer.

Re:summary

[Retric]

It's "biased" in that it assumes a single study is correct.

"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 relatively untested theory.

Possibly intuitive?

[theundergroundman]

One of the problems with the older strains of stem cells in US research is that they often caused cancer in experimental mice. Going from undifferentiated to rapidly differentiating. When you think about those results this finding makes intuitive sense but I am also not a biologist, at least not full time.

SciAm had article about this in July

[tcdk]

... and luckily it's one of their rare free ones:

Stem Cells: The Real Culprits in Cancer?

Re:Seems too basic to be noticed only now

[DDLKermit007]

Major advances are more often than not made through simple changes to the accepted "norm." What usually drags such things on is that those that have a vested interest in one form of advancement paying off they will not risk another way. As such it usually ends up requiring fresh blood in the mix. Another problem there is often times the new blood has set ways impressed on them by the mentors and as such regurgitate the same, wrong, answers till someone often times risking tanking their career (see invitro fertilization) comes along with something like this. I'm not saying this is "the" way, but at least someone is looking into new techniques.

Re:fox is spinning so hard i'm dizzy

[SnowZero]

So how long until we have some person who is opposed to harvesting aborted fetuses wielding this nugget of information in his crusade against taxpayer funding of stem-cell research?

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 choices we face in current society.

Known to cause cancer...since 1902!

[transporter_ii]

I think we should give credit where credit is due:

The Trophoblast Thesis Of Cancer "In 1902, John Beard, a professor of embryology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, authored a paper published in the British medical journal Lancet in which he stated there were no differences between cancer cells and certain pre-embryonic cells that were normal to the early stages of pregnancy,"

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

Obvious.

[Spazmania]

What, this wasn't obvious? Entire rows of teeth have shown up inside of tumors and nobody thought to say, "Gee, maybe there are some rogue stem cells at work here." What blindingly obvious connection will they fail to see next? The possibility that stem cells may turn out not to be useful because when properly stimulated to grow a replacement body part, they behave precisely like cancer?