Question: how can stem cells help to treat cancer?

Sharon Sneddon answered on 11 Mar 2011:

Hello and thanks for your question.
It’s a little bit tricky, as the work that I do has shown that as well as being useful in treating cancer (I’ll explain why in a second), stem cells can also cause some cancers, those stem cells are tricky little things! In certain cancers, it’s thought that stem cells can lie “dormant” essentially sleeping until a trigger sets them of to grow and divide in a way that can cause a tumour. These kind of stem cells are also very hard to kill off by radiation therapy, which is something else that scientists are trying to work on.

Now for the positives!
In my lab, I use stem cells from the breast in lots of different experiments to try and understand why sometime breast cancer spreads around the body. I then try and make this process stop using different drugs and treatments and it is hoped that in the future, these things could be used on patients. It takes a lot of experiments and time for this to happen, which is why we need lots of scientists working on stem cells and cancer!