A new comparison of normal stem cells and cancer stem cells reveals that the cancer stem cells are abnormally trapped at an early stage of development.
The research, published by Cell Press in the January issue of Cancer Cell, significantly advances the understanding of glioma pathophysiology and provides new directions for design of therapeutic strategies that are targeted to specific types of tumors.
Tumor-initiating cells with stem like properties (TICs) are thought to be a small population of tumor cells that have many characteristics in common with normal stem cells (NSCs) in that they are self-replicating and capable of giving rise to populations of differentiated cells. Previous research has demonstrated that TICs are present in different types of brain tumors, including glioblastomas. Although the TICs share many properties with NSCs, they are known to possess genetic aberrations that support a tumorigenic phenotype.
“Thus far, there have been few, if any, reports demonstrating exactly where along the developmental pathway of tissue-specific stem cell maturation and differentiation tumor stem cells arise, and which, if any, of the intrinsic stem cell signaling pathways are perturbed in tumor stem cells remains largely unknown,” explains Dr. Howard A. Fine from the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. To better understand the development and differentiation pathways that play a significant role in cancer stem cells, Dr. Fine and colleagues isolated TICs from primary human glioblastomas and compared them to human and mouse NSCs at various developmental stages.