Possible prostate cancer culprit
Scientists identify a type of stem cell and a gene that play a role in the disease
SAN DIEGO — Some self-renewing stem cells may be a prime culprit in prostate cancer, and a certain gene in these cells contributes to the malignancy, suggests research reported February 20 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Prostate cancer is the most common malignancy in men in the Western world, affecting one in six men.
“Think about cancer as a disease of stem cells,” said study coauthor Owen Witte, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles. Mutations in these cells can cause “normal stem cells to lose their regularized behavior and instead turn into an incipient cancer,” he said.
Like many other tissues in the body, prostate tissue is made up of several different kinds of cells, including a class called basal stem cells. Normally these cells divide to replenish prostate tissue, but sometimes they become cancerous. Instead of producing normal cells, these stem cells lead to tumors.
“When we apply stem cell thinking to cancer, we find that in the run-up to cancer — the premalignant period — many, many genetic and heritable changes occur in the line of stem cells,” commented stem cell biologist Irving Weissman of Stanford University.