Cancer Therapy: A new dimension to identify Healthy Cells and Cancer Cells

Rama Kant Mishra January 07, 2009

The biggest challenge of cancer therapy today is that along with destroying the malignant cells the treatment also kills the normal and healthy cells in the process. A new study by McMaster University researchers has come up with insight into how scientists might develop therapies and drugs which can carefully target cancer, while saving the normal healthy cells.

Mick Bhatia, scientific director of the McMaster Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, and his team of investigators have shown the difference between normal stem cells and cancer stem cells in humans for the first time.

The discovery has been published in the journal Nature Biotechnology January 4, which could eventually help with the further customization and targeting of cancer treatments for the individual patient. It will immediately provide a model to discover drugs using robotic screening for available molecules that may have untapped potential to eradicate cancer.

“Normal stem cells and cancer stem cells are hard to tell apart and many have misconstrued really good stem cells for cancer stem cells that have gone bad - we now can tell the ones masquerading as normal stem cells from the bad, cancerous ones,” said Bhatia.

“This also allows us to compare normal versus cancer stem cells from humans in the laboratory - define the differences in terms of genes they express and drugs they respond to. Essentially, we can now use this to find the “magic bullet”, a drug or set of drugs that kill cancer stem cells first, and spare the normal healthy ones,” he said.