Possible explanation for recurring breast cancer
Now, researchers at the Texas A&M College of Medicine have found that these dormant tumor cells might have become latent because they cannibalized -- basically ate -- the body's own stem cells. The study was published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ). The team had been working on teaching adult stem cells from bone marrow, called mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs), to fight cancer when they noticed that the MSCs were disappearing from the cell cultures. "We actually thought we made a mistake or were witnessing an anomaly or negative result, " said Thomas J. Bartosh, PhD, assistant professor at the Texas A&M College of Medicine and first author of the study. "We eventually realized that the breast cancer cells were eating the stem cells. What was really interesting was what happened next: The breast cancer cells that had taken in the stem cells went dormant -- essentially became 'sleepy' -- but at t...