Project Details
Abstract
The evidence for mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) as active participants in cancer is just emerging, with more questions raised than answered. Recent reports proposed that the bone-marrow-derived MSCs can be recruited in large numbers to the stroma of developing tumors. The biological rationale for tumor recruitment of MSC remains unclear yet. It has been reported that MSCs or MSC-like cells could be isolated from lipoma tissues and bone sarcomas. The distribution of MSCs in other tumor types, however, is not known until the very recent report of MSC-like cells isolated directly from human gastric cancer tissues [Cancer Lett. 2009 Feb 8;274(1):61-71]. Whether these tumor-derived MSCs participate in the initiation, promotion or inhibition of tumor growth remains controversial. Their biological properties such as phenotypes, anti-oxidative stress, DNA damage repair and epigenomic modifications are not clear as compared to the counterpart bone marrow-derived MSCs. As the knowledge increases in this emerging field of cancer-MSC biology, it will no doubt bring forth a novel anti-cancer strategy specifically targeting MSCs. Based on recent studies describing the localization of systemically infused bone marrow-MSCs to colon carcinoma, we thus propose to isolate MSCs from colorectal tumor tissues as the initial step. Thereafter, we will characterize the biological properties of these tumor-derived MSCs aforementioned using the established systems for bone marrow-MSCs in our laboratory.
Project IDs
Project ID:PC10001-0107
External Project ID:NSC98-2314-B182-030-MY3
External Project ID:NSC98-2314-B182-030-MY3
Status | Finished |
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Effective start/end date | 01/08/11 → 31/07/12 |
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