Picking cancer stem cells out of the crowd
Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - 09:00
in Health & Medicine
(Medical Xpress) -- Stem cells receive a vast amount of research attention due to their abilities to differentiate, heal, and divide in perpetuity, properties that yield promise for regenerative medicine. In cancer stem cells, however, those same properties pose a dangerous threat. Both healthy and cancer stem cells share a number of features, so targeting the bad while sparing the good has often been a difficult proposition. New research by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator pinpoints differences between cancer stem cells in squamous cell cancer and normal stem cells in the skin, which could be exploited to create powerful new anti-cancer therapeutics.