Most people are fairly familiar with the benefits of cell therapy, and the use of human adult stem cells in medicine. Stem cell transplants can aid stroke recovery, there is parkinson's treatement with stem cells, and cord blood cells are regularly saved and can be used later in a baby's life for disease cures and injury recovery.
However, the discovery of cancer stem cells is a relatively new one, and scientists have only recently been able to isolate these cells within a tumor. The possibilities are enormous.
Scientists at the OU Cancer Institute, led by Courtney Houchen, MD and Shrikint Anant, Ph D, have found a particular protein that only grows in stem cells. This allows them to identify which cells within a cancerous tumor are stem cells, where earlier only proteins that appeared in both stem and non-stem cells within cencerous tumors could be indetified.
The potential to treat disease like cancer as well as having stem cell therapy for diabetes, stem cell therapy for parkinson's, and to assist stroke recovery is one of the most important of the year.
The group of scientists that isolated the cancer stem cell is now beginning work to use the protein as a target for compounds that could attach themselves to the stem cells and kill them.
Targeting the stem cells would allow doctors to stop the cancer from returning much more effectively - and indeed may be able to prevent relapse and metastasis altogether.
The stem cell research of Houchen and Anant will focus on human adult stem cells from cancers, rather than embryonic stem cells. There will also be far fewer ethical and legal issues to overcome in this stem cell research avenue.
The benefits of adult stem cells in the research include that fact that they play a large role in the beginning of cancer, the spread and also the return of cancer after treatment.
It seems that the failure to have identified or targeted stem cells in cancers to date may be one of the reasons that some cancers, for example ovarian cancer, are so resistant to treatment. Ovarian cancer is usually discovered in late stages, and and has a 55%-75% relapse rate within 2 years.
It is usually treated with paclitaxel, a drug which only destroys cancer cells susceptible to the drug, and allowing the cancer cells which are unaffected by paclitaxel to remain. It was assumed that these unaffected cells (CD-44 negative cells) had little health impact, as CD44 is associated with increased survival time in ovarian cancer.
Stem cell therapy of a different sort - killing cancer stem cells - should have great implications for ovarian cancer patients.
Stem cell therapy is a growing area of research, however initial breakthroughs like this can take years to come onto the market.
While the acceptance of stem cell therapy for stroke and stem cell therapy for diabetes is good, research on this new facet of stem cells could take 5 years to complete clinical trials of, with the compound expected to be available to the public within 10 years.
Author Resource:-
ReturningHope.com - is an interdisciplinary group of individuals who have pooled their expertise together in order provide a service to patients globally and that will find them the best treatment method for their conditions.
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