I continue to read about cancer; my type of cancer and cancers in general. I have four primary sources: 1) The daily Wall Street Journal, 2) The Sunday New York Times, 3) friends/family who send me articles, and 4) Google alerts. For those not familiar with Google alerts, it is a Google feature which allows one to set up specific searches to run continuously, daily, or weekly for subjects in which one has an interest. This is where I find most of my cancer-related reading materials. For more information on Google Alerts, just google it.
Today's Sunday New York Times Magazine section had a fascinating research-oriented articles on cancer stem cells, "The Cancer Sleeper Cell." It's a long article, but provided added insight into my understanding of how important it would be to fighting relapses if one could identify, isolate, and destroy the cancer stem cell. What the article highlighted for me was that researchers believe that only one bad cell in a million bad cancer leukemia (a blood cancer) cells is a stem cell which can cause a relapse. The hypothesis being that if they can kill that one cell in a million, they can stop the cancer from relapsing. They were able to take this finding and apply it to various solid tumors. It also raised other important questions about what defines a cure and how to measure a treatment's success.
I was able to Google the article and the link is...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/magazine/31Cancer-t.html
For those that are interested, enjoy this somewhat intellectually challenging reading. Take care everyone.
Ed