Wounding may induce stem cells to trigger cancer

摘要

Researchers have previously tied defects in wound healing with cancers of the lung, liver, bone, pancreas, and skin. Stem cells help regenerate tissues after injury, but their role in the development of injury-related cancer is poorly understood. Sunny Wong and Jeremy Reiter (pp. 4093-4098) explored whether follicular stem cells, located within hair follicles in the skin, can trigger human basal cell carcinoma (BCC), a potentially disfiguring skin cancer, upon injury. The authors created transgenic mice harboring follicular stem cells with a cancer-causing mutation in a gene involved in BCC.