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Dr. John Dick, a senior scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, is shown in a handout photo. <\/p>\n
TORONTO Canadian researchers have discovered a pre-leukemic stem cell that may be at the root of acute myeloid leukemia and also be the bad actor that evades chemotherapy and triggers a relapse in patients who have gone into remission. <\/p>\n
Acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, is a rapidly progressing cancer of the blood and bone marrow that affects myeloid cells, which normally develop into mature red and white blood cells and platelets. <\/p>\n
Leukemia develops when blood stem cells in the bone marrow make abnormal blood cells, which over time crowd out normal blood cells, affecting their ability to function as they should. <\/p>\n
READ MORE:Could this new therapy kill cancer? Canadian doc thinks so <\/p>\n
In a paper published online Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers led by John Dick of Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto report on the discovery of a pre-leukemic stem cell the forerunner to leukemia stem cells that give rise to the disease. <\/p>\n
A leukemia stem cell can lie dormant and theyre the ones that will sustain the growth of the leukemia, Dick said in an interview. The pre-leukemic guys are basically the ancestors that are on their way to becoming leukemia and becoming leukemic stem cells. <\/p>\n
Dicks lab was the first to identify the existence of leukemia stem cells, in 1994, followed by the discovery of colon cancer stem cells in 2007. <\/p>\n
Teasing out pre-leukemic stem cells from the blood of AML patients based on samples taken at diagnosis, after chemotherapy-induced remission, and then following recurrence advances the understanding of the genetic changes a normal cell has to go through before it turns into AML. <\/p>\n
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Scientists discover pre-leukemic stem cell at root of cancer<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ; Dr. Continue reading