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.

Fundamental Flaw

[onion2k]

There's a huge flaw in the article. You don't kill the king in chess, you capture him.

Re:Fundamental Flaw

[Suhas]

Nope. it means the King has been defeated. "Mat", which is a word common to Urdu and Hindi as well, means defeat, while "Shah", of course, means King

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.

fox is spinning so hard i'm dizzy

[macadamia_harold]

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?

Re:fox is spinning so hard i'm dizzy

[Froster]

Or it will work in the opposite sense. Its hard to argue against research that can cure cancer. There has been a lot of talk about the use of stem cells to treat inherited disease, but thats largely something that only those unfortunate enough to suffer from that disease would favour (or publicly advocate). Cancer on the other hand is something that everyone can relate to, and everyone knows a victim of. If you told even the most ardent Bush supporter if they are willing to do whatever they can to cure cancer, I doubt they would be willing to say no.

Re:fox is spinning so hard i'm dizzy

[Fryed]

First off, Embryo != Fetus

If you don't know what embryo means, here's a helpful link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryo#Growth_of_the_ Human_Embryo

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.

Operation: Eradication

[Dachannien]

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.)

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?

Vitamine B17

[Frans Faase]

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.

Re:Vitamine B17

[Unc-70]

Vitamin B17, also known as Laetrile. The evidence is in and it doesn't work. It's not approved by the FDA and those that push it can face jail time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laetrile

Re:And this is useful, how?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

Forbes.com - Cancer Killer article (good read)

[transporter_ii]

[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