Stem Cells Indicated in Another Form of Cancer

Stem Cells Indicated in Another Form of Cancer

Stem cells have recently been identified as possible cancer causing cells in bone cancer (see Blog Post of 11/23/05) and some forms of brain cancer (see Blog Post of 10/18/05). They have also been identified in some other cancers. Now, new research says that they may play a part in prostate cancer as well. Researchers at the Yorkshire Cancer Research Unit at York University in England have found stem cells in prostate cancer tumors. When the cells were cultured, they developed into tumors. The story is reported several places, including in the Times, in Med India, and the Yorkshire Post, which also includes a case study. The Post article is the most detailed about the procedure: the researchers used protein markers to locate the cancerous stem cells in 50 tumors.

The importance of this for cancer research is immense. Current cancer treatments such as chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery target the tumor cells. However, since the tumor cells are perhaps not the root cause of cancer, eradicating them without eradicating the stem cells means that the cancer can reoccur. To understand this, think about other stem cells and how they are different from normal healthy cells. Your heart stem cells generate heart muscle cells; if you removed heart muscle cells without removing the stem cells, then the stem cells could grow new heart tissue. A cancer is an uncontrolled cell growth; stem cells have apparently gotten their instructions mixed up somehow and are producing abnormal cells at a rapid rate. Many current drugs are designed to kill the cancer cells based on how quickly they divide (so that that slowly dividing normal healthy cells would not be killed as a side effect), but since stem cells divide at a different rate, the drugs may miss them too. So new cancer drugs that affect stem cells need to be developed.

So what makes a stem cell turn cancerous? Well, that’s what we need to know. If we really understood how stem cells worked, then we might know what makes them not work. But there’s still so much to learn.

In other prostate cancer-related news, researchers at the Ohio State University have developed a new line of prostate cancer cells that will help improve laboratory research into the disease. A brief UPI story on this appears in Science Daily.