Cross-country collaboration leads to new leukemia model
And after almost a decade of bicoastal collaboration, Emmanuelle Passegué, now a professor in the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the University of California, San Francisco, and Amy Wagers, a professor in Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, have the answer. They have found that cancer stem cells actively remodel the environment of the bone marrow, where blood cells are formed, so that it is hospitable only to diseased cells. This finding could influence the effectiveness of bone marrow transplants, currently the only cure for late-stage leukemia, but with a 25 percent success rate due to repopulation of residual cancer cells…