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

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.

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?

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