Killing Cancer Stem Cells With Chemicals
In late 2009, a multi-institutional team of researchers from the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard discovered an exciting new chemical that specifically targets aggressive cells within breast cancers that normally have the ability to seed new tumors; these cells are otherwise known as cancer stem cells.
The general concept is that most medical practitioners and scientists believe that these specific cancer stem cells allow cancer to spread throughout the body, possibly reemerging after treatments that otherwise seem successful.
Currently, the research has only been performed on mice, but the study does show that there is a possibility for chemicals that can be used in the human body to selectively kill cancer cells at their primary core: the stem cell.
Studying Stem Cells According to Robert Weinberg, one of the authors of the study and a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, "Evidence is accumulating rapidly that cancer stem cells are responsible for the aggressive powers of many tumors.
The ability to generate such cells in the laboratory, together with the powerful techniques available at the Broad Institute, made it possible to identify this chemical.
There will surely be dozens of others with similar properties found over the next several years.
" The paper was published in the medical journal Cell, and the lead author, Eric Lander - director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School - says that, "Many therapies kill the bulk of the tumor only to see it grow.
This raises the prospect of new kinds of anti-cancer therapies.
" The evidence was fairly overwhelming and backs an emerging idea in cancer biology that tumors can harbor a group of cells within them that have a unique ability to regenerate cancers, which in addition to promoting the growth of tumors are also extremely resistant to current cancer therapies.
By identifying chemicals which can specifically kill these cancer stem cells, these chemicals may be used in future drug development to create cancer-seeking drugs that literally seek and destroy the cancerous cells within the body.
Unfortunately, these cancer stem cells are extremely rare, and considering that they lose their properties when grown outside of the body, research has been severely limited due to a lack of material available for analysis; however, there are a variety of studies underway seeking to establish a better consensus.
A Future Cancer Cure? Researchers from Broad and Whitehead Institute have used additional research to generate a fairly large number of these cancer cells in laboratory environments.
Unfortunately, this has only been completed on mice and limited in scope to focusing upon breast cancer in particular.
The compound they discovered is called salinomycin.
It destroys not only cancer stem cells created in the laboratory, but also those which are naturally occurring.
Salinomycin, when compared to the common chemotherapeutic drug paclitaxel, reduced the number of cancer stem cells by more than 100-fold in 30 mice.
In addition, it also reduced the size of the breast tumors that it did not eliminate completely.
While not conclusive by any means, the evidence is fairly compelling and has sparked further research into the cure for cancer.
The general concept is that most medical practitioners and scientists believe that these specific cancer stem cells allow cancer to spread throughout the body, possibly reemerging after treatments that otherwise seem successful.
Currently, the research has only been performed on mice, but the study does show that there is a possibility for chemicals that can be used in the human body to selectively kill cancer cells at their primary core: the stem cell.
Studying Stem Cells According to Robert Weinberg, one of the authors of the study and a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, "Evidence is accumulating rapidly that cancer stem cells are responsible for the aggressive powers of many tumors.
The ability to generate such cells in the laboratory, together with the powerful techniques available at the Broad Institute, made it possible to identify this chemical.
There will surely be dozens of others with similar properties found over the next several years.
" The paper was published in the medical journal Cell, and the lead author, Eric Lander - director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School - says that, "Many therapies kill the bulk of the tumor only to see it grow.
This raises the prospect of new kinds of anti-cancer therapies.
" The evidence was fairly overwhelming and backs an emerging idea in cancer biology that tumors can harbor a group of cells within them that have a unique ability to regenerate cancers, which in addition to promoting the growth of tumors are also extremely resistant to current cancer therapies.
By identifying chemicals which can specifically kill these cancer stem cells, these chemicals may be used in future drug development to create cancer-seeking drugs that literally seek and destroy the cancerous cells within the body.
Unfortunately, these cancer stem cells are extremely rare, and considering that they lose their properties when grown outside of the body, research has been severely limited due to a lack of material available for analysis; however, there are a variety of studies underway seeking to establish a better consensus.
A Future Cancer Cure? Researchers from Broad and Whitehead Institute have used additional research to generate a fairly large number of these cancer cells in laboratory environments.
Unfortunately, this has only been completed on mice and limited in scope to focusing upon breast cancer in particular.
The compound they discovered is called salinomycin.
It destroys not only cancer stem cells created in the laboratory, but also those which are naturally occurring.
Salinomycin, when compared to the common chemotherapeutic drug paclitaxel, reduced the number of cancer stem cells by more than 100-fold in 30 mice.
In addition, it also reduced the size of the breast tumors that it did not eliminate completely.
While not conclusive by any means, the evidence is fairly compelling and has sparked further research into the cure for cancer.
