RARE but pernicious cancer “stem” cells, blamed for the spread and invincibility of some tumours, may be more vulnerable than we thought.
The suggestion is that a small number of such cells within tumours may be the precursors to the other cancer cells in those tumours. The stem cells may also be resistant to ordinary cancer drugs, causing the cancer to recur.
To hunt for drugs that target these cells, Piyush Gupta, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute at the , and colleagues genetically engineered ordinary human cells so that they acquired some of the…
