Bruce Boman, senior research scientist, at the Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute of Christiana Care Health System, has received a $917,000 grant award from the Lisa Dean Moseley Foundation to further stem cell research into the origins of colon cancer.
The three-year grant will enable Boman and his team at the Center for Translational Cancer Research at Christiana Care to continue building on their discovery that stem cell overpopulation is the mechanism that drives cancer development and growth in the colon.
Boman’s team will take a multidisciplinary approach drawn from tumor biology, cancer genetics, pathology, medical oncology and molecular biology to discover how stem cells are regulated in the normal healthy colon and how gene mutations contribute to stem cell overpopulation in tumors.
Specifically, they will study how inactivation of the adenomatous polyposis coli tumor suppressor gene leads to stem cell overpopulation that drives colon cancer development and growth.
Earlier this year, Boman published findings that the retinoic acid signaling pathway acts to induce differentiation of colon cancer stem cells and reduce cancer stem cell overpopulation. Boman’s findings suggest that treatment with retinoid drugs, which are derived from vitamin A, could provide a therapeutic strategy to selectively target cancer stem cells and decrease the number of highly resistant cancer cells.
Conventional research over the last 50 years has been that tumors undergo a series of genetic mutations that lead to the unchecked growth of tumors and their progression to metastatic cancer. Traditional therapies designed to kill the bulk of cancer tumor cells continue to fall short of a cure for advanced, drug resistant colon cancers.
“Our thinking has shifted to the insight that cancers originate in tissue stem cells through dysregulation or malfunction of the self-renewal process and that cancer stem cells drive tumor growth,” Boman said in a statement. “It follows that the optimal way to treat cancer (especially advanced cancer) is to eliminate cancer stem cells.”
