The stem cell is a bit like the griffin of mythology - half lion, half eagle; gt and and power ful, but potentially monstrous in effect. These essentially unspecialized cells can renew their own population while supplying cells that mature (differentiate) into the specialized cells necessary for all tissues. Although this ability to reproduce and self-renew is sublime when functioning properly, its disorder creates masses of dysfunctional replicating cells. Indeed, stem-cell-like cells have been found in a range of human tumours. Not all cancer is due to a stem cell gone bad, but some cancer-initiating cells are probably stem cells, and the rest acquire the stem-cell feature of self-renewal. This raises the troubling spectre that normal stem cells and cancer stem cells might share the molecular features essential to their nature. So attempting to treat cancer by disrupting the functions of the cancer stem cells might also disturb normal stem cells -potentially fatally.
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