Melanoma In Mice Casts Doubt On Scarcity Of Cancer Stem Cells

摘要

The rare cancer stem cells' thought to seed cancer growth are not so rare after all, according to researchers in Michigan. If they're right, then the strategies used for some cancer therapies may need to change. The research challenges the notion that there is an elite set of tumour cells that continually regenerates a cancer, says William Kaelin, who studies tumour-suppressor proteins at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, and was not affiliated with the study. "If it turns out that the cells were never rare, then we've been studying those cells all along," he says. "And a cancer stem cell is just a cancer cell." Previous studies had transplanted human cancer cells into immunocompromised mice that still had enough of an immune system to fight the transplanted cells. The latest work introduced human melanoma cells into a more severely immunocompromised mouse strain1'2. Under these conditions, the rate of tumour initiation surged. In less immunocompromised mice, only 1 in 837,000 cells regenerated melanoma. In the new mice 1 in 4 cells did.