Drug Compound That Kills Cancer Stem Cells Identified

If my Swiss cheese like memory doesn't fail me:

I think it was Israeli scientists who were first able to separate regular cancer cells and stem cancer cells in the lab.

It turns out stem cancer makes regular cancer. If you implant regular into a cancer free mouse it almost never develops cancer. But implant stem and you've got cancer.

Further more, regular c. cells grow too fast and are thus more susceptible to treatment then healthy cells. But stem c. cells don't, and they often survive treatment.

And stem c. cells tend to be in the center of tumors, surrounded by and protected by regular c. cells.

Makes you be in awe of cancer a bit a more doesn't it?

I am not impressed by promising results in mice, mice are a terrible model for human cancer. But what I found interesting is this:

They then used rapid screening techniques to test 16,000 commercially available chemical compounds.

This is a brute force search and I hope we see more of it. It can be automated and done by machines.

Bloomberg presents the research finding in a different light: the article focuses on the fact that 1 compound out of 16000 researched was identified as the most effective at targeting cancer stem cells. However, the main outcome of the research, as NYTimes[1] points out, is that a new screening method has been developed to be able to quickly identify drugs that effectively target only the cancer stem cells. In fact, 32 chemicals were identifed as effective at killing stem cells. Only 1 of these is an approved drug.

The NYT article is more interesting because they mention two schools of thought among cancer researchers: on the one hand, there are researchers who think that only the stem cells must be targeted in order to completely kill off the cancer. They believe chemotherapy is ineffective because it kills all types of cells but fails to completely kill all the cancer stem cells. Even if 99% of the cells are targeted, the presence of remnant stem cells may result in the cancer returning. The other camp takes the view that it is not sufficient to kill stem cells only.

This is just my understanding of the articles. I'm not a biologist in any way & I'd love to read the views about the significance of these findings by hackers more versed with the topic

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/health/research/14cancer.h...

The article is unspecific about what these compounds do to regular stem cells. It would be interesting to know if the most effective compound also kills regular stem cells, or if it somehow distinguishes between cancer and non-cancer cells.

(What happens to tissue when you take away its stem cells, anyway? Does it just age more rapidly? Or die off?)