Scientists from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have developed a new drug testing method using stem cells. This innovative process allows researchers to quickly screen drugs that are used to treat rare forms of cancer. It will help doctors find suitable drug treatments for uncommon forms of cancer.
Details of the new process were published in the August issue of Clinical Cancer Research. Researchers turned human stem cells into a rare form of brain cancer called medulloblastoma. The genetic profile of the cells is then compared to other lab-grown cancer cells that have been tested against cancer drugs.
Researchers can then find a drug that has been shown to successfully treat similar forms of cancer and test it on the lab-grown cancer cells. If successful, it can be used to treat a patient. Because the cancer cells were created from human stem cells, they give researchers a very accurate determination if the cancer drug will be effective.
Paediatric medulloblastoma is a rare form of cancer that only affects a few hundred children each year in the United Kingdom. One variation of this cancer that is responsible for 28% of cases has a low survival rate of between 30 to 40 percent. Conventional treatments such as chemotherapy and drug therapy are not particularly effective with this subtype.
In the past few years, researchers have been cataloguing different types of cancer and associating them with drugs that are effective treatments. Unfortunately, rare cancers like paediatric medulloblastoma do not have particularly effective drugs available.
By creating cancer cells from human stem cells, the scientists can explore drug treatments and quickly tell which drugs are effective. To create the new drug screening process, scientists used lentiviruses to place genes linked to cancer in human neural stem cells. The genes caused some of the neural cells to turn into cancer cells. These cancer cells looked and acted like the cells associated with paediatric medulloblastoma tumours.
The researchers then sampled the RNA of the tumours to observe the cancer cell’s gene expression. They could then screen various drugs to see if they were effective at treating this form of cancer.
Source: Stem cells may speed up screening of drugs for rare cancers
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