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Adult stem cells and their more committed kin, progenitor cells, are prized by medical researchers for their ability to produce different types of specialised cells. The potential of using these cells to repair or replace damaged tissue holds great promise for cancer therapies and regenerative medicine. However, the question that must first be answered is what determines the ultimate fate of a stem or progenitor cell? A team of researchers led by Berkeley Lab’s Mark LaBarge and Mina Bissell appear to be well on the road to finding out.
Working with unique microenvironment microarrays (MEArrays) of their own creation, LaBarge and Bissell and their collaborators have shown that the ultimate fate of a stem or progenitor cell in a woman’s breast – whether the cell develops normally or whether it turns cancerous – may depend upon signals from multiple microenvironments.
‘We found that adult human mammary stem and progenitor cells exhibit impressive plasticity in response to hundreds of unique combinatorial microenvironments,’ said LaBarge, a cell and molecular biologist in Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. ‘Our results further suggest that rational modulation of the microenvironmental milieu can impose specific differentiation phenotypes on normal stem or progenitor cells, and perhaps even impose phenotypically normal behaviour on malignant cells during tissue genesis. All of this points to the rational manipulation of adult stem and progenitor cells as a promising pathway for beneficial therapies.’
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