Cancer Theory

"The authors concluded that human colon-cancer stem cells are defined not by their intrinsic gene-expression patterns, but by their location." "if these same cells are removed from adult tissues, they quickly reactivate multipotency, or the ability to differentiate into discrete cell types, including cancerous ones, reinforcing the tissue environment’s crucial role in tumor development." "...suggesting that the tissue environment plays a part in defining stem cells." https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01029-4?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=908962649e-briefing-dy-20210421&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-908962649e-45862826

Researchers engineer a switch to tame aggressive cancers Quoting from the ScienceDaily article: "Certain proteins, such as E-cadherin, are important for the maintenance of normal tissue structure. When tumors become more aggressive, they often lose E-cadherin, resulting in dramatic changes to their structure, function and ability to spread. But when cancer cells are forced to express E-cadherin, research suggests they behave less aggressively and revert back to normal." And, "'Although genomics technology has revealed many new proteins that could force cancers to 'switch' back to their less aggressive state, these new targets have not yet been validated in preclinical models like mice because it is difficult to determine the molecular effects on each individual cancer cell, Dr. Lewis says.'" Cadherin and catenin mechanisms have been at the top of my list of possible candidates for the Cell Recognition Factor whose malfunction or disassociation and do...

Researchers are still trying to use embryonic stem cells (ES) to cure disease and continue to encounter tumor formation. A recent study did something along the right lines when it co-transplanted bone marrow stem cells (BMSC)along with ES. There were no tumors formed during the 5 weeks of the study. To me, this indicates that the BMSC had started to revert back to ES and these provided the CRF's required by the original ES to prevent them from forming tumors. What needs to be done is to search for CRF's in embryonic tissues. The main difficulty here is which of the hundreds of molecules on the cell surface are CRF's. I am working on trying to identify candidates for this role. One that caught my eye was the SSEA or stage-specific embryonic antigen because this theory requires that there be stage specificity. A candidate that I focused on back in the 70's when I first came up with the CRF theory were the glycoconjugates simply because they play a role in such phenomena a...