Genetic changes during the initiation and progression of prostate cancer have eluded scientists to date. Now for the first time researchers have identified a specific gene expression profile of prostate cancer stem cells, with important implications for future treatments.
The findings, published in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Biology, revealed 581 genes that are differentially expressed in certain prostate cancer cells, highlighting several pathways important in the cancer stem-cells biology, and offering targets for new chemopreventative and chemotherapeutic approaches.
The cells in the study represent less than 0.1% of prostate cancer tumors, and have properties that mark them out as cancer stem cells. The cells renew themselves, are highly invasive, and have a longer lifetime than normal stem cells. They also feature a primitive epithelial phenotype and can differentiate to recapitulate phenotypes seen in prostate tumors. The cells are found in all stages and types of prostate cancer.
Expression profiling of prostate cancers typically uses tumor cell mass samples to identify individual genes. In this study, researchers harnessed advances in microarray and target labelling technologies to produce a functionally annotated expression profile of these prostate cancer stem cells.