Source: Stanford University
Date: April 9, 2008
Summary:
With a bit of genetic trickery, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have turned normal skin cells into cancer stem cells, a step that will make these naturally rare cells easier to study. Howard Chang, MD, PhD, assistant professor of dermatology and senior author of the work, said being able to generate cancer stem cells from normal cells will help move that research forward. The study also demonstrated that cancer stem cells are much more similar to the stem cells found in embryos, which can develop to form all tissue types, than they are to the more-restricted adult stem cells. This finding has important implications for understanding how cells go awry when they become cancerous.
