As expected, patients left with the fewest cancer stem cells after the therapy lived longest.
Researchers at several other labs found evidence of brain cancer stem cells at about the same time.
But this was the luck of the draw, for the rituximab failed to kill the cancer stem cells.
New York City-based Stemline Therapeutics develops treatments that target both cancer tumors and cancer stem cells, which generate tumors.
In these people, the proportion of cancer stem cells decreased from 10% before therapy to 7.5% after they were treated.
The cancer stem cells probably had the same protein, Dirks figured.
In retrospect, the discovery of stem cells cancer stem cells included may come to be seen as a step in a comprehensive theory of how organisms work.
Like natural selection and germs, the discovery of cancer stem cells illustrates how the most fruitful scientific findings are often not those of individual experiments, however intriguing, but those that organise knowledge into theory.
It was previously assumed that the cells damaged by cancer therapies were the stem cells in the gut tissue.
His diabetes work led him to understand how to create a drug that would get directly into cancer cells, which were a lot like the stem cells he was studying in diabetes.
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Using tumor samples from wo-men with breast cancer, he used a gadget called a cell sorter to sift through dozens of different proteins on the surface of breast cancer cells, searching for patterns that might identify stem cells.
The first solid evidence implicating stem cells in cancer came in the early 1990s when John Dick, a stem cell researcher at the University of Toronto, developed a method for transplanting cancerous human bone marrow cells into mice.
For reasons as yet unknown, stem cells are resistant to standard cancer chemotherapies.
After years of work his team, in early 2003, unearthed a rare group of stem cells present in human breast cancer tissue.
They believe a single type of cell may be cancer's main growth engine:mutant stem cells that, though barely present, spawn other cells that then spark growth.
The concept that stem cells run-amok may fuel cancer's spread was first proposed in the 1960s.
These mutant stem cells already have been found in breast cancer, two types of leukemia and multiple myeloma.
Sure enough, he found that the only cells that could produce new tumors in the test tube were the ones with CD133--strong circumstantial evidence that defective stem cells were the growth factor in brain cancer.
Eggan's technique, which is the subject of a paper in the current issue of Nature, creates stem cells specific to a particular disease, like cancer or diabetes, without a supply of human egg cells.
When someone receives a bone marrow transplant as a treatment for cancer, what they are getting is an injection of the hematopoietic stem cells that are found in bone marrow.
Professor Ian MacKenzie, a researcher in stem cell biology from the Queen Mary School of Medicine and Dentistry in London, said that it was still likely that stem cells played a significant role in the development of cancer.
Some researchers predict that stem cells eventually will be found in most major types of cancer.
Because tumors are caused by stem cells run amok, drugs to turn down their activity might be potent cancer medicines.
There aren't enough stem cells in an umbilical cord to serve as a treatment for a disease like cancer or heart disease.
Someday the ability to measure the level of stem cells in a tumor could lead to new prognostic tests that predict when a cancer is likely to accelerate, helping doctors customize treatment.
Peers in parliament's upper chamber voted by 212 to 92 on Monday to allow research using stem cells to develop treatments for killer diseases such as leukaemia, Parkinson's and cancer.
He has found that stem cells, harvested from the brains of normal rats and injected into those suffering from brain cancer, will home in on gliomas within days of their introduction.
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