Cancer stem cells made, not born
In cancer, tumors aren’t uniform: they are more like complex societies, each with a unique balance of cancer cell types playing different roles. Understanding this “social structure” of tumors is critical for treatment decisions in the clinic because different cell types may be sensitive to different drugs. A common theory is that tumors are a hierarchical society, in which all cancer cells descend from special self-renewing cancer stem cells. This view predicts that killing the cancer stem cells might suffice to wipe out a cancer. New findings by scientists at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and Whitehead Institute, however, point to a much more decentralized society, with cancer cells able to interconvert between different types. These results have potential implications for the treatment of tumors, in particular, that attacking cancer stem cells alone may not be enough to fight cancer. The research, which appears in the Aug. 19 issue of...