Saturday 12 April 2008

New Cancer stem cell Therapies

Source:Science Daily
Wikipedia
Hello everyone!!! It has been a long time since I posted something on my blog. Now I have got the right topic to start off with. Ok. I got this one from sciencedaily.com . Scientists from the University of Michigan have found out an interesting way of blocking the cancer stem cells from proliferation.
The theme of the research is to combine chemotherapy with a drug that woudl block the notch signalling pathway.
Let me throw some light on the notch signalling pathway. This is basically a pathway which helps in the proliferation of stem cells. It keeps the stem cells in teh proliferative state so that it can replenish the dead cells. What happens in cancer cells is that this notch pathway is disturbed resulting in continued proliferation.
In the current research, the scientists aim to use notch inhibitors to disrupt the growth of the cancer stem cells.
The issue that arises now is whether this treatment would also affect the normal stem cells. But this fear was allayed by the scientists by doing a research on mice in which they experimentally blocked the notch signalling pathway and the mice still survived.
The scientists feel that this method of targetting the cancer stem cells could be very efficient since that's what drives the cancer malignant growth.
The method theya re using here is a 2 step process. First they would use notch inhibitors and make the cancer stem cells sensitive to chemotherapy after which they would use the same to knock the cells out.

3 comments:

Sudipta Das said...

Hello Carolyn
on this issue I am fully agree with you. but If we want to combat against a dreadful disease like cancer we need a comprehensive knowledge of the cancer symptoms that can lead to the infliction of the disease which would help us to nullify

its consequences at the elementary level.

thank you

sudipta das

R.Sitaram said...

I agree with both of you. I have not been in touch with my blog for some time since I was pre occupied with other work. From now on, I'll be more regular. :-) And the main aim of this blog is to inform people about the latest advances in cancer. Only interested people like us can do it. Scientists will be too busy discovering these things that we post.... :-)

Anonymous said...

this is really cool thing