(Key points: The most important tumor cells with an amazing feature (“X” cell?) are very difficult to get. It is certainly not the cancer stem cells people in the town are talking about. If we can successfully get those cells it will be a truly big scientific breakthrough and worthy to be on the cover page of the Scientific American or National Geographic or the New York Times.)
After several most influential media started a review of the results of forty years war on cancer, a professional journal joined the reflection as well. Because cancer stem cell is a white hot topic so it is nature for the professionals to talk about any progress in the field. Everyone agrees if the cancer stem cells exist and are properly targeted, then the chemotherapy may be dramatically approved and many nasty problems such as drug resistance, cancer recurrence, failure in designing new effective drug etc may be easily solved. Nowadays, there are many thousand research papers having been published. But in the past when some top scientists in the field tried to reproduce some other’s results, it was always disappointed. When the top professional journey tried to review the topic is not satisfied neither. According to the journey the cancer stem cells were defined as cells with enhanced tumor-initiating potential relative to other cancer cells within a tumor as well as displaying self-renewal potential and producing non-cancer stem cell progeny.
This is a problem, a very big problem. You can easily image what consequence would be if the basic definition gets incorrect or totally wrong. If nobody so far has shown a convincing evidence what exactly those cancer stem cells look like, the very reason may be because no one has idea what a correct definition is. What’s the enhanced tumor-initialing potential? By a limited dilution method scientists and doctors have established hundred tumor cell lines. Are all those cell lines counted as cancer stem cells, just as some already claimed? In those dozens of thousands research articles which one can clearly show the characteristic of this “self-renewal potential”?
If researchers really want to have a brand new mindset for cancer, and truly want to solve the mystery surrounding those all important tumor cells, all needed are to think the way the mass are not thinking now. Those tumor cells are certainly not the cancer stem cells the scientists and researchers are studying now and talking about.
There will be beautiful tumor cells, let’s call it as X cell (or named after any one whom generosity makes it possible), which is worthy appearing in the cover page of New York Times or the Scientific American or National Geographic because of some very unusual features and its critical roles in cancer. To extensively and thoroughly study and better understand those cells are keys to answer the following wide range questions:
Why there is hair loss after chemotherapy and how to prevent it?
Why drug resistance happens and how to overcome it?
How cancer occurs in the first place and how to prevent it from the very beginning?
Why there is no any drug so far can cure cancer, how to get multiple drugs to do just that?
(You can ask some questions, then see how the particular question be affected by finding and targeting those X cells.)
Of course, it is not impossible to get those cells. However, to pick up a right one from billions and billions of tumor cells among a tumor mass is not easy task, neither. When someone tells you that he/she is already getting those simply by sitting beside some machines for few hours. You know he/she must get some cheap stuff, too cheap to be true. Let’s remember the history how Mrs. Marie Curie got the first radioisotope radium and polonium. That is how hard and how difficult before you can truly see the face of those beautiful X cells.
(This article is the second in a series of “the brand new mindset for cancer” essays. It was published on 8/30/2011.)
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