Prostate cancer stem cells

Stem cells are very rare and might one day be used to treat medical problems such as diabetes and Parkinson's disease. But there is also a dark side to stem cells - we believe that cancer often starts in a stem cell.

The concept that cancer is a stem cell disease has a very important consequence. Much of the therapy that is used to treat cancer kills lots of the cancer cells, but tends to spare the cancer stem cells. So if we could target and kill the cancer stem cells, there is the possibility of curing the cancer.

We were awarded two R01 grants from the US National Institutes of Health for our stem cell research - these grants are rarely given to scientists working outside the US. But they said that "the group is clearly doing the very best work on prostatic stem cells in the world". The scientific journal in which we published our work described the results as "the best bet yet to represent the true prostate stem cell".