This week’s blog post concerns new research from Oxford University which has developed a new way of looking at cancer cells and which is being seen as a really significant finding in the fight against the disease.

The research [Stem cell research could weed out cancer] involves isolating cancer stem cells, keeping them in a laboratory and using them to test against possible new drug treatments. This is a far quicker way of using them effectively; the previous way of using cancer biopsies from human patients, enriching their number in samples and waiting to see if they produced tumours in mice was laborious by comparison.

Dr Trevor Yeung, from the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at the university was even for claiming that this new development could lead to a cure. He said: “Cancer stem cells drive the growth of a tumour. If we could target treatments against these cells specifically, we should be able to eradicate cancer completely."

He said that people previously assumed that cancer stem cells made up a small proportion of the cells in a tumour but this wasn’t correct and the most aggressive tumours are composed mainly of cancer stem cells.

Important new research which could in time, prove crucial to our understanding of how tumours develop and spread, and which could even lead to a breakthrough in our knowledge of how to beat cancer? Or are these claims from the university premature and intended mainly to grab headlines?

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