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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."
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.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
There's a huge flaw in the article. You don't kill the king in chess, you capture him.
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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.
The Globe and Mail reports that cancers have at their core a small number of stem cells, without which they cannot spread or reoccur.
So how long until we have some partisan halfwit wielding this nugget of information in his crusade against stem-cell research?
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Since stem cells come from embryos, and stem cells also cause cancer, the solution is obvious.
We must eradicate all embryos.
(We should probably eradicate all babies while we're at it, just to be safe.)
Stem Cells: The Real Culprits in Cancer?
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I remember that Dr. G. Edward Griffin, the author of "World Without Cancer : The Story of Vitamin B17", has been claiming for a long time that stem cells are at the core of cancer, and that vitamine B17 is very effective in helping the body stop stem cells from going wild and causing cancer. I have followed the debate around vitamine B17, but so far have not come to a conclusion whether it is real or a hoax.
Core of Cancer?
Easy answer.
Research me closer,
Tiny dancer.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Often, this coincides with the original cancer cell "de-differentiating"
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.
Well, I disagree with the statement about the FDA, but that's an argument for another time. Other sources include: MHRA http://www.mhra.gov.uk/home/idcplg?IdcService=SS_G ET_PAGE&nodeId=433&within=Yes&keywords=laetrile/, Cancer Research UK: http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/help/default.asp?page =21859/ and the USA National Cancer Research Institute http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/cam/laetril e/Patient/page2/.
The wikipedia article linked previously also has a good summary.
Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm.
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
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
[Again, keep in mind that to isolate stem cells, scientists "peel away" the trophoblast.]
http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2004/1227/070.ht 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
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
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
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
No, it wasn't obvious. The type of tumor you are talking about are called Teratoma. I can't explain what they are and won't even try as I am in no way qualified to do so, but anyway, read the wikipedia entry. And by the way, don't you think that these guys know what they are doing? They have been researching on the subject for years, they have conducted experiments, studied the field, etc, for all of their life. Don't you think that if it had been so obvious that, well, they would probably have found it before?
I'd rather be sailing...
IAAB (I am a biologist). From what I've learned, what allows cancer cells to divide indefinitely is that there are mutations in the proteins that control the cell cycle. Normally, there are proteins that inhibit the cell from continual division. However, in many cases, these proteins are mutated and can no longer perform their functions allowing the cancer cell to divide indefinitely. Unfortunately, they are not all the same. There can be several causes to why they behave like cancer cells. Mutations in these proteins are only one cause.
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.