Bowel cancer treatment progress
One of the most common cancers in the United Kingdom is bowel cancer, and that’s why a team of Dutch and UK scientists were pleased to announce that they’ve made progress in exposing the deadly disease.
What scientists would like to know is why a normal, healthy bowel cell turns “bad” and becomes cancerous. Of course, first they have to find which healthy cells are the ones that turn “bad”. All cell types in the colon arise from stem cells – so-called “master cells” – which can form a variety of different tissue types. When a stem cell divides in two, one half becomes another stem cell, while the other “daughter” cell has begun the transformation into the cell needed to form another tissue type.
Now, scientists discovered that there is a gene called APC, which is a tumour suppressor gene, which actually decides how the cell is devided. While doing research on mice, they took out that gene, and within days cancer started to appear.
“We are very excited by these findings but we need to establish whether the stem cells will behave the same way in human cancers as they do in mice,” said Hans Clevers from Hubrich Institute. “So this work is a big leap forward in our understanding of the origins of the disease.
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