14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers with the John Hopkins University in the United States claim that, when it comes to fighting aggressive brain cancer, human fat might just prove a worthy ally. Specifically, they say that stem cells derived from fat can successfully be used to deliver treatment.
In a report published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research this May 1, the scientists explain that the idea that human fat can help fight brain cancer is backed up by the outcome of a series of experiments that they carried out on laboratory mice.
In their paper, the researchers detail that, after deriving stem cells from human body fat, they managed to use these cells to deliver biological treatments into the brains of rodents suffering with cancer. According to EurekAlert, the mice lived longer than they would have, if left untreated.
The tumors the rodents used in these experiments had in their brains were glioblastomas, i.e. the most common and most aggressive brain tumors in humans. The trouble with such tumors is that the cells that form them can migrate across the entire brain, hide and then emerge to establish new tumors.
This means that, even if patients are operated on and doctors manage to remove a large portion of the tumors in their brains, odds are it is only a matter of time until the few glioblastoma cells that are left behind form new tumors. Hence, cure rates for this type of cancer are very low.
Now that stem cells derived from human body fat have been shown to be able to deliver biological treatments directly to the brains of mice, researchers hope that this procedure could one day be used to treat human patients diagnosed with brain cancer.
Thus, the stem cells would act as so-called Trojan horses, meaning that they would enter the brain, explore it for a while, and, upon coming face to face with a cancer cell, attack it. It is expected that, together with surgery, this method of treatment would help up cure rates for aggressive brain cancer.
“These modified mesenchymal stem cells are like a Trojan horse, in that they successfully make it to the tumor without being detected and then release their therapeutic contents to attack the cancer cells,” explains Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, M.D., a professor of neurosurgery, oncology and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Despite the success reported while carrying out experiments on mice, specialists caution that it will probably be at least a few years before scientists have enough information to proceed with carrying out trials involving human patients.