Scientists Create Breast Tumor Stem Cells

MONDAY, Aug. 13 (HealthDay News) -- U.S. scientists say they've succeeded in growing breast cancer stem cells from normal tissue.

Since it is suspected that these types of cells give rise to cancer's spread, isolating them could prove invaluable in the fight against the disease, experts say.

"There has not been any publication to my knowledge that has demonstrated a way to isolate these cells from human patients and expand them, meaning grow them in Petri dishes," noted study lead author Dr. Tan Ince, an "independent signaling investigator" at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, both in Boston.

The findings, published Aug. 13 in the journalCancer Cell, should help provide a common platform from which scientists can study these so-called tumor stem cells.

Making sure that tumor stem cells are similar between labs is crucial to advancing cancer research, Ince explained.

"Confirmation of results of one scientist by other independent scientists is critical for scientific progress, so it's important for different labs to have the choice to use similar or identical cell stocks," he said. "If two labs have different results, it is not possible to know whether this is a real difference or simply because different labs are using different cell stocks," he said.

However, "Until now, most labs that study human tumor stem cells had to use their own stock of cells, because it has been difficult to grow them in the Petri dish," Ince said. "We think this is what we accomplished and hope that this will allow different labs to compare their results much more easily with each other in the future."

Ince conducted the research while a member of the Weinberg Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Whitehead Institute. Dr. Robert A. Weinberg, who discovered the first human oncogene in 1982, was senior author of this paper.

Recent research has suggested that not all cells in a tumor are created equal and that only some are capable of causing trouble.

"Tumor stem cells are cells that can initiate a whole tumor," Ince explained. "Experimentally, people have found that the vast majority, 99 percent, of the cells in the tumorcannotinitiate a tumor in the next mouse. Only about one in a million does."

"You can imagine that if one of these dead-end tumor cells went to the lung or brain, they may not be consequential, whereas tumor stem cells are very aggressive and would be establishing a metastasis," he continued.

However, the work is cutting-edge right now, and not all scientists agree that tumor stem cells are at the root of most cancers.