Sep 09
5
New Drug Targets Breast Cancer Stem Cells
I love when exciting news comes out about new drugs or treatments other than radiation and chemotherapy for breast cancer, or any other kind of cancer for that matter. This time the news is particularly exciting because it involves a new drug that researchers are saying targets and kills what they call the “master cancer cell” which is thought to be the ultimate reason behind why many times cancer comes back in people that have experienced a remission. These master cancer cells are thought to basically be genetically programmed to be harder to kill, and are actually the mothers of other cancer cells in a way because they are the basis by which new cancerous cells are formed.
The new evidence on these master cancer cells strongly suggests that they are the very reason that many people experience a recurrence in their cancer even years later sometimes after the treatment has stopped, or even soon after treatment has stopped for the cancer. Cancer stems cells are extremely hard to actually pin down to study because, like other stem cells in the body, they can quickly transform into different type sof cells, making them difficult to trace and treat, and they are also exceptionally harder to kill than a normal cell or a cancerous cell even.
The winning chemical out of about 32 chemicals that were shown to be beneficial in the trials to kill and target stem cells that were cancerous was a chemical called salinomycin. When these cancer stem cells were exposed to the salinomycin, they were much less potent and ineffective at triggering breast cancer in the mice they were injected into ( I know, poor mice, I feel bad for them!), and so the conclusion obviously was that this was a powerful breast cancer stem cell combatant, which is welcome news to an area that until now yielded little real results due to the difficulty in pinpointing these elusive stem cells.
They are now trying to utilize this compound into something that is useable and safe throughout the woman’s whole body who has breast cancer, and which are able to safely target these stem cells without causing massive breakdown of any other cells in the body, like with chemotherapy. The stem cells are particularly dangerous because they have the capability to mock other types of cells and also to replicate exact copies of themselves, therefore self renewing constantly and becoming twice as virulent.
