Stem cell therapy as a single agent or in combination with standard therapies.

[Easey]

I read somewhere about why tumors grow back after radiation or chemotherapy and a simplified explanation was that it was all about the damaged healthy tissue surrounding any of the leftover cancerous cells and if this tissue is made up of young cells or mature cells. The cancerous cells do not like to be crowded and young cells have the ability to divide more rapidly than the cancer cells, basically stopping there growth. Likewise mature cells divide slower and the cancer cells grows before the healthy tissue can repair itself.

My question is - could stem cells be used to repair the damaged healthy tissue before the cancer cells start there growth.

Basically where are we out with stem cells ?

[Tall_Allen]

It's not the benign tissue stem cells, there are cancer stem cells that are relatively impervious to chemo, hormone therapy, and radiation. There are several clinical trials of therapies targeted at prostate cancer stem cells.

Tanya Dorff at City of Hope is investigating whether CAR-T can be used to target them:

clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show...

Other PC Stem cell antibody tests are in the works:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

sciencedirect.com/science/a...

[Easey in reply to Tall_Allen]

Seems like the "silver bullet" in CAR-T is finding the right antigen to target. PSCA referred to in the links you provided sounds promising.

Thanks Allen