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Research Highlights

Stemming the spread of cancer

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) have been proposed as an explanation for the spread of cancer. These cells are tumorigenic and have the capacity of both self-renewal and differentiation into a range of various cell types. In this concept, malignant tumors provide heterogeneous aspects derived from CSCs as well as normal stem cells provide tissue specific phenotype in response to their microenvironment.

Researchers have now demonstrated in vitro the development of CSCs from a type of normal stem cell exposed to their hypothetical microenvironment of a tumor. The results are the work of a group of scientists led by Masaharu Seno, a professor of Okayama University, with his collaborators in China and the US.

The researchers cultured mouse induced pluripotent stem (miPS) cells in a conditioned medium obtained from a number of mouse cancer cell lines. Finally, a population of stem cells was kept undifferentiated and proliferating while other stem cells differentiated into specialized cells, which were incapable of proliferation any more.

Since the survived miPS cells treated with the conditioned medium were found malignantly tumorigenic in vivo, they concluded that the cells could be defined as CSCs . "The model of CSCs and the procedure of their establishment will help study the genetic alterations and the secreted factors in the tumor microenvironment which convert miPS cells to CSCs," explain the authors. The work should help breakthrough towards the development of new therapies to combat cancer.

Reference:
・ Authors: Ling Chen1,2,3, Tomonari Kasai1, Yueguang Li4, Yuh Sugii1, Guoliang Jin1, Masashi Okada1, Arun Vaidyanath1, Akifumi Mizutani1, Ayano Satoh5, Takayuki Kudoh1, Mary J. C. Hendrix6, David S. Salomon7, Li Fu8, Masaharu Seno1
・ Title of original paper: A model of cancer stem cells derived from mouse induced pluripotent stem cells
・ Journal, volume, pages and year: PLoS One 7, e33544 (2012).
・ Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1371/journal.pone.0033544
・ Affiliations:

1 Department of Medical and Bioengineering Science, Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University, Okayama, Japan.

2 Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo, Japan.

3 Department of Pathology, Tianjin Central Hospital of Gynecology Obstetrics, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China.

4 Department of General Surgery, Tianjin 4th Centre Hospital, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China.

5 Multidisciplinary Division, Okayama University, Okayama, Japan.

6 Children’s Memorial Research Center, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America.

7 Laboratory of Mammary Biology and Tumorigenesis, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America.

8 State Key Laboratory of Breast Cancer Research, Department of Breast Cancer Pathology and Research Laboratory, Cancer Hospital of Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China