●Glioblastoma is a highly vascular tumor, it is also most common primary brain tumor.
●Human stem cells which are made from human skin cells can help treating human brain cancer as published in Science Translational Medicine.
●Firstly mouse skin cells were converted into stem cell that killed huma brain cancer cells, effectively increasing time of survival 160 to 220 percent, depending on the tumor type.
●Now the same is done with human stem cells and the results were not only better but quicker and could help whose median survival is less than 18 months and chance of surviving beyond two years is 30 percent.
●“Speed is essential,” says Shawn Hingtgen. “It used to take weeks to convert human skin cells to stem cells. But brain cancer patients don’t have weeks and months to wait for us to generate these therapies. The new process we developed to create these stem cells is fast enough and simple enough to be used to treat a patient.”
Image: Globocan
●The key to Hingtgen’s treatment is “skin flipping,” a technology for creating neural stem cells from skin cells that won a Nobel Prize in 2012.
●The first step is to harvest fibroblasts—skin cells responsible for producing collagen and connective tissue—from the patient and reprogram those cells to become what are called induced neural stem cells.
●Then these stem cells are engineered to carry therapeutic agents that the cells can launch at the tumor to kill it.
●Hingtgen’s stem cells can carry a protein that activates an inert substance called a prodrug that is given to the patient. The cells can then generate a small halo of drug that is located just around the stem cell, rather than it being circulated throughout the patient’s body, reducing unwanted side effects.
●“We’re one to two years away from clinical trials, but for the first time, we showed that our strategy for treating glioblastoma works with human stem cells and human cancers,” Hingtgen says. “This is a big step toward a real treatment—and making a real difference.”
Credit and source: weforum.org
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