Researchers in Galway are focusing on how cells in the bone marrow react to aggressive anti-cancer treatments. Claire O'Connell reports.
Stem cells hold enormous promise for treating a variety of diseases. But the much prized traits of these "master" cells, which have the capacity to develop into a number of different cell types, may hide a lesser known, darker role where more sinister stem cells could drive cancer growth.
Some stem cells may also be resilient to aggressive treatments designed to wipe out normal cancer cells, and the question is whether surviving and possibly damaged stem cells could go on to cause further problems for the patient.
Now researchers at NUI Galway want to find out how stem cells react to current treatments for leukaemia, a cancer that affects the body's ability to generate the components of blood from cells in the bone marrow.
Stem cells already form an important part of therapy for leukaemia patients who receive a bone marrow transplant.
Following treatment to kill off the patient's own cancerous marrow, the patient receives donated marrow. Then blood-forming stem cells present in the transfused marrow generate a new blood system in the recipient.
But the Galway researchers are focusing on a lesser understood population of cells in the bone marrow called mesenchymal stem cells that normally give rise to structural elements of bone and also appear to aid in blood formation.
"There's some evidence that they play a role in regulating the growth and differentiation of blood cells, but it's not well understood," says Dr Michael Carty, a lecturer at NUI Galway's biochemistry department. "They are there, they are potentially important but not much is known about how they respond to treatments."
Working with cells donated from healthy adult volunteers in the lab, Carty's team will expose the mesenchymal stem cells to standard anti-cancer treatments of ionising radiation or chemotherapy.
These treatments are designed to kill cancerous cells by damaging their genetic material, but Carty wants to find out how mesenchymal stem cells respond.
They could repair the damage to their DNA to the point where they can survive; alternatively the aggressive anti-cancer treatments may trigger the stem cells to die too.
"It's important to know that. It could have implications about how a patient might respond to a further bone marrow transplant with blood-forming cells," he says, adding that if a reservoir of damaged mesenchymal stem cells survive in marrow after anti-cancer treatment, these residual cells could potentially go on to seed more cancer.
While research has been carried out into blood-forming stem cells, this is the first time anyone is seriously looking at the effects of cancer treatments on mesenchymal stem cells, according to Prof Frank Barry, scientific director of Remedi at NUI Galway, whose team will provide human mesenchymal stem cells and expertise for the work.
Barry believes the concept of stem cells having a potentially sinister role in cancer development does not necessarily detract from their general value in therapeutics.