Stem cell concepts renew cancer research

Very good review by John Dick was written for American Society of Hematology 50th anniversary – Stem cell concepts renew cancer research.

John Dick is widely credited for identification the first cancer stem cells in human in 1994 – acute leukemia stem cells. In this review he paid special attention to the methods for identification of cancer stem cells, because it caused some controversies in the field.

Clearly, technologies that were not available in the 1970s were required to move the field forward. However, I do not think the absence of technology can fully explain why lags existed from the mid-1970s when all the theoretical principles pointing to the existence of LSCs and a description of their properties were well worked out, to the mid-1990s when direct proof for the existence of LSC was finally discovered, and then to the most recent years when CSC concepts have been extended to solid tumors.

It was within this milieu that 2 important technologic advances took place that directly led to the renewal of interest in the concepts of LSC from 20 years earlier. The first was the development of fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS), and the second was the development of xenotransplantation assays for normal and leukemic human stem cells.