NEW YORK — How can a cancer come back after it’s apparently been eradicated? Three new studies are bolstering a long-debated idea: that tumors contain their own pool of stem cells that can multiply and keep fueling the cancer, seeding regrowth.
If that’s true, scientists will need to find a way to kill those cells, apart from how they attack the rest of the tumor.
Now, three studies reported online Wednesday in the journals Nature and Science present evidence for cancer stem cells within the original tumors. The research relies on mice. That and other factors mean the new findings still won’t convince everyone that cancer stem cells are key to finding more powerful treatments.
But researcher Luis Parada, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, believes his team is onto something. He says that for the type of brain tumor his team studied, “We’ve identified the true enemy.”
If his finding applies to other cancers, he said, then even if chemotherapy drastically shrinks a tumor but doesn’t affect its supply of cancer stem cells, “very little progress has actually been made.”
