Word: stemness
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...better aim at cancerous cells. But those therapies treat all cancer cells as equals. The next generation of treatments, doctors say, needs to recognize and target the root cause of tumors. "It requires a reorientation in people's thinking," says Weinberg. "We need to focus on wiping out the stem cells rather than eradicating the bulk of the tumor...
Such a shift in thinking is already under way, thanks to the special nature of cancer stem cells. Unlike embryonic stem cells, which stir up moral and political passions because they can, in theory, be used to create an entire human being, cancer stem cells are mutated forms of adult stem cells that can only make copies of their own cell type, be it blood or skin or lung tissue. What gives those adult cells their "stemness" is the ability to generate more stem cells like themselves (and thus continue to regenerate blood or skin tissue) and to churn...
...challenge is to find a way to identify and isolate those cells. Scientists are starting with what they know, analyzing the proteins that stud the surface of normal stem cells and looking for proteins unique to the cancerous cells. So far, leukemia experts have the edge, working from the knowledge of blood stem cells they have been building since the 1940s. Dick's group in Toronto was the first to identify a protein, CD34, as a potential screen for leukemia stem cells. He showed that tumor cells with plenty of CD34, when injected into mice, flowered into cancerous growths. Leukemia...
...hope is that once those "stem-defining" proteins are identified, they might be used as targets for drug therapies that could lead to better cancer treatments. Irv Weissman, the developmental biologist at Stanford University who first isolated the blood-forming stem cell, is working on pinpointing just such a suite of proteins for leukemia...
Weissman and others are finding no shortage of targets. For one thing, cancer stem cells seem to be extremely mobile, able to migrate easily from their birthplace to other parts of the body, where they can churn out more stem cells and launch new tumors. Eradicating those cells at their source might help control the spread of cancers like leukemia that flare from the blood to the bone marrow and other tissues. Blocking a stem cell's source of nutrients might be another effective strategy for drug development. Unlike normal stem cells, which tap into many different blood supplies...