Tumor Stem Cell-Based Drug Discovery for Adult and Pediatric Glioma

This collaborative will examine the hypothesis that a critical component of brain tumors are tumor stem cells that may be the cells of origin for primary brain tumors. Increasingly, the brain tumor research community hoped that brain tumor stem cells might provide novel and effective therapeutic targets. Although tumor stem cells have been identified and targeted in hematopoietic cancers, the hypothesis that brain cancers harbor a cancer stem cell population is not without controversy. The brain cancer stem cell hypothesis is further complicated by a lack of understanding of the contribution of normally occurring neural stem cells to brain function. It is not clear what the toxicity effects might be if therapies targeted to brain cancer stem cells also attacked the normal neural stem cell populations. It is important that this promising, but as of yet, unproven hypothesis be pursued.