Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Escaping fates with open states
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7257/pdf/nature08212.pdf
Friday, August 14, 2009
Identification of Selective Inhibitors of Cancer Stem Cells by High-Throughput Screening
Article
Piyush B. Gupta1, 3, 7, , , Tamer T. Onder1, 2, 7, Guozhi Jiang1, 3, Kai Tao4, Charlotte Kuperwasser4, Robert A. Weinberg1, 2, 6, 8, , and Eric S. Lander1, 2, 3, 5, 8, ,
Received 21 October 2008;
Summary
Screens for agents that specifically kill epithelial cancer stem cells (CSCs) have not been possible due to the rarity of these cells within tumor cell populations and their relative instability in culture. We describe here an approach to screening for agents with epithelial CSC-specific toxicity. We implemented this method in a chemical screen and discovered compounds showing selective toxicity for breast CSCs. One compound, salinomycin, reduces the proportion of CSCs by >100-fold relative to paclitaxel, a commonly used breast cancer chemotherapeutic drug. Treatment of mice with salinomycin inhibits mammary tumor growth in vivo and induces increased epithelial differentiation of tumor cells. In addition, global gene expression analyses show that salinomycin treatment results in the loss of expression of breast CSC genes previously identified by analyses of breast tissues isolated directly from patients. This study demonstrates the ability to identify agents with specific toxicity for epithelial CSCs.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Cell death Regulation by BH3-Only family proteins.
El volumen 27, suplemento 1, de la revista Oncogene, está dedicado a la familia de proteínas con sólo el dominio BH3.
http://www.nature.com/onc/journal/v27/n1s/index.html