In a very interesting research development, a group at Georgetown University here in the US has finally found a way to be able to extract and grow the normal and cancerous prostate cells from individual patients in the laboratory and then implant them into mice.
What is important about this is that it should make it possible to gain a far more sophisticated understanding of the ways differing types of prostate cancer actually progress over time and how it may be possible to interrupt the progression of those differing types of prostate cancer. To date, there has been a very limited set of cultures of prostate cancer cells available for research purposes, and most of those cell lines have come from metastatic tumors in patienst with advanced forms of disease.
According to the new paper by Timofeeva et al. (in the journal Oncotarget) and the associated report on the ScienceDaily web site the cells that grow in the mice appear to behave identically to the cells extracted from the original patient, based on a whole range of different tests.
While this new technology is going to be of little help for prostate cancer patients in the immediate future, this may actually be a very big deal in helping to make serious progress in the development of safer and more effective treatments for prostate cancer in the future.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: cells, culture, laboratory, research |
THE "NEW" PROSTATE CANCER INFOLINK 
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