Although current dosing cancer treatments can kill most cancer cells, they are threatened with the possibility of recurrence or metastasis by the few remaining cancer cells.Associate Professor Toshiro Sato of Keio University and others have accomplished the functional analysis of "cancer stem cells", which is thought to be the cause, and the development of a targeted treatment model.
The research group has developed a technology for observing the dynamics of human colorectal cancer cells in vivo in mice.From this, it was confirmed that there are cancer stem cells in human colorectal cancer tissue that repeat self-renewal and differentiation to increase the tumor.
Furthermore, we developed a treatment model that kills only cancer stem cells and verified the effect of cancer stem cell target treatment.As a result, it was found that even if the cancer stem cells are removed, the differentiated cancer cells have the ability to "return" to new cancer stem cells and do not completely cure the cancer.
Therefore, we also verified the combined use of existing therapeutic agents that target differentiated cancer cells and cancer stem cell-targeted therapies.Dramatic tumor shrinkage was observed by performing cancer stem cell-targeted therapy for cancer that had shrunk due to medication.
It can be said that this result has shown a solid path to the development of a radical treatment for cancer.
Paper information: [Nature] Visualization and Targeting of LGR5 + Human Colon Cancer Stem Cells
