PRE-cancerous stem cells could be sensitive to existing cancer drugs, but only if they are treated at a very early stage, according to new research which suggests it may be possible to prevent bowel cancer in people born with a very high risk of developing it.
The study was presented by Michael Hodder, a researcher at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute in Glasgow, at the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Cancer Conference in the city today.
Previous research has suggested stem cells play a key role in the development of cancer, but they have proved very difficult to treat in established tumours.
Hodder said: “Stem cells play an important role in our bodies because they are capable of dividing and growing into lots of different types of cells.
“They are also found in tumours where this ability to multiply makes it more difficult to stop cancers from growing and spreading.
“I wanted to study cancer stem cells more closely to see if I could discover a vulnerability that could be targeted to treat cancer more successfully.”
Working with Professor Owen Sansom, director of the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute, Hodder studied the role of stem cells in the guts of mice which had been bred to mimic a human hereditary condition called familial adenomatous polyposis or FAP.
People with FAP have more than a 95% chance of developing bowel cancer, with an average age at diagnosis of 40. They carry a fault in a gene called adenomatous polyposis coli (APC).
The mice also carried a faulty equivalent of the APC gene so, if left untreated, they would go on to develop tumours in their guts.
Researchers used existing cancer treatments at a very early stage to see if any could halt the development of tumours and found that one, called cisplatin, could prevent cancer in the mice.
Hodder said: “Cisplatin is a powerful cancer drug that can cause serious side-effects, so we will need to discover whether it can work on pre-cancerous stem cells at very low doses, or whether we can find other drugs that have the same effect but with fewer side-effects.”
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