UPDATE - Issue 30 - Summer 2007
Understanding stem cells in cancers
Dr David Hudson explains some research we have been funding at the Institute of Cancer Research.
All tissues in the human body are believed to contain a small number of cells called 'stem cells'. These stem cells provide a reservoir for growth and cell replacement in each tissue and are important in wound repair. It has recently become clear that stem cells may also play a role in diseases such as cancer.
Cancer that has escaped from the prostate gland eventually ceases to respond to androgen targeting therapy.
Current therapies target the majority of cells in the tumour and it is possible that certain characteristics of stem cells, such as dividing only very rarely, or having the ability to pump out drugs, allow them to survive such treatments.
Our project studies stem cells from advanced, hormone refractory disease where the patients no longer respond to androgen targeting therapy. With the support of a grant from Prostate Research Campaign UK, we have been isolating candidate stem cells from patients at the Royal Marsden Hospital with advanced relapsed cancer and have begun to compare them to cells isolated from normal tissues. This funding has supported a clinical fellow, Alison Reid, for the first year of her PhD. She has been involved in the collection of needle biopsies from hormone refractory cancers and establishing cell cultures from them. We have then been using magnetic beads coated with antibodies to stem cell markers to separate the stem cells from the bulk of the cells for analysis. A technique called gene expression micro array was used to look at the relative levels of expression of thousands of genes simultaneously in order to obtain a picture of how the stem cells may be different from their daughter cells and how they differ from stem cells in benign prostate. We are now preparing this data for publication and the hope is that this may provide candidate targets that will allow us to specifically halt the growth of the stem cells and so prevent progression of the cancer.