New Drug Research shows cancer stem cells not invulnerable

A promising new cancer drug targets and kills the pernicious tumour cells responsible for metastasis and relapse. It is far too early to test the drug, called salinomycin, in humans, but the findings offer hope that the so-called cancer stem cells will eventually prove vulnerable to treatment.

"It's been thought that these cells are responsible both for metastasis and for recurrence following anti-cancer therapy," says Piyush Gupta, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the new study. "There's been a lot of evidence to suggest that cancer stem cells are resistant to a variety of cell-death-inducing agents."

Gupta's team found that salinomycin kills breast-cancer stem cells at least 100 times more effectively than another popular anti-cancer drug. And mice implanted with human breast-cancer cells and later treated with salinomycin showed fewer signs of metastases than mice given a standard cancer therapy. Click here for More....