Question

Cancer is relatively well defined, stem cells are well defined, but cancer stem cell is unfortunately not the sum of these two. In a way, cancer stem cell definition is subjective (i.e. it’s like beauty or social justice, it depends on who you are talking too). Discuss why you agree or disagree with this statement. (5 points)

Answer 1

Cancer stem cell hypothesis suggests that there is a small subset of cancer cells that are responsible for tumour initiation and growth, possessing properties such as indefinite self-renewal, slow replication, intrinsic resistance to chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and an ability to give rise to differentiated progeny.

Stem cells survive much longer than ordinary cells, increasing the chance that they might accumulate genetic mutations. It might take only a few mutations for one cell to lose control over its self-renewal and growth and become the source of cancer. So this is actually the catch as stem cells and cancers cells both can survive up to indefinite periods still demarcation between both the types can easily merge by the loss of some property that may convert the stem cells into cancer cells.