The existence of cancer stem cells have started as a hypothesis and followed by enormous number of experimental evidences. Still, a large number of scientists in stem cell areas and other research areas are very skeptical about the existence of cancer stem cells. We can believe the existence of cancer stem cells and its role in cancer from all the reported studies on the isolation/characterization of cancer stem cells in various cancers such as leukemia, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, lung cancer, liver cancer, colon cancer etc from past and ongoing research on cancer stem cell. The PubMed searches on cancer stem cells showed more than 5000 articles as of October 2009 and this data indicates that the first research article on cancer stem was published on 1976 (see the box to see all the PubMEd search results). It is evident that the concept of cancer stem is known to us for more than 23 years. If the scientist would have accepted the existence of cancer stem cells a decade ago, possibly we would have been in a better position in finding a cure for cancer or may be closer to achieve this goal? May be the concept of stem cells were not established at that time?
We speculate that the real benefit of stem cells will not come from in vitro differentiation of embryonic (hES) or induced pluripotent (iPS) stem cell into tissues or organs or the injection of stem cells. Better not to be, because these stem cells may be similar to cancer cells (1) and may carry several genetic mutations (2). We do not know the genetic safety of current in vitro grown cells in stem cell therapy. Read more: http://www.sciclips.com/sciclips/blogMain.do
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