Scientists have for the first time successfully turned skin cells into cancer-hunting stem cells that destroy brain tumours, an advance that can offer a new and more effective treatment for the deadly disease.
The survival rate beyond two years for a patient with brain tumours known as glioblastoma is 30 per cent because it is so difficult to treat, researchers said.
Even if a surgeon removes most of the tumour, it is nearly impossible to get the invasive, cancerous tendrils that spread deeper into the brain and inevitably the remnants grow back. Most patients die within a year and a half of their diagnosis.
"Patients desperately need a better standard of care," said Shawn Hingtgen, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who led the study.
Researchers developed a new personalised treatment for glioblastoma that starts with a patient's own skin cells, with the goal of getting rid of the cancerous tendrils, effectively killing the glioblastoma.
They reprogrammed skin cells known as fibroblasts - which produce collagen and connective tissue - to become induced neural stem cells.
Working with mice, researchers showed that these neural stem cells have an innate ability to move throughout the brain and home in on and kill any remaining cancer cells.
The team also showed that these stem cells could be engineered to produce a tumour-killing protein, adding another blow to the cancer.
Depending on the type of tumour, researchers increased survival time of the mice 160 to 220 per cent.
Next steps will focus on human stem cells and testing more effective anti-cancer drugs that can be loaded into the tumour-seeking neural stem cells.
"We wanted to find out if these induced neural stem cells would home in on cancer cells and whether they could be used to deliver a therapeutic agent," Hingtgen said.
"This is the first time this direct reprogramming technology has been used to treat cancer," he said.
The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.
