Issn Print: 1742-8009

Publication Date: 2007/06/01


Print

Stem cell migration to injury site is key to leukaemia

Rabiya Tuma

    loading  Checking for direct PDF access through Ovid

Excerpt

Although localised radiation treatments increase the long-term risk of leukaemia in cancer survivors, the exact mechanism that underlies the late effect is unclear. To learn more about this, researchers at the Ontario Cancer Institute have engineered a system to follow the movement of haematopoietic stem cells in living mice after radiation exposure. The results suggest that the stem cell's natural tendency to migrate to the site of injury may be a key step in the development of leukaemia, according to work presented at the AACR Meeting.
If the model is correct, the work could be used in prophylaxis strategies.
Acute myelogenous leukaemia, like other leukaemias, is thought to arise when haematopoetic stem cells become damaged or corrupted. Yet the stem cells are thought to be particularly sensitive to radiation, and thus should die when exposed to multiple rounds of fractionated radiation.
For example, in breast cancer patients undergoing localised radiation therapy, ‘you can calculate that around five to 10 per cent of bone marrow is exposed to radiation in these patients’, said the study's lead researcher, Dr Carlo Bastianutto, a scientific associate at the Ontario Cancer Center in Toronto.
‘But it is still hard to explain; if you give this woman fractionated radiation therapy and it is always the same five to 10 per cent of the marrow exposed, in the long run all of these cells should just be wiped out. Unless, that is, the stem cells are moving in and out of the radiation-exposed region and are thus able to escape death.
    loading  Loading Related Articles