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Most of us were taught that all malignant cells in a tumor have the potential for uncontrolled growth. However, in the past decade, some cancer biologists have postulated that only a few cells in a tumor have such potential. These cells, called cancer stem cells, have different genetic and phenotypic characteristics than the much larger mass of tumor cells that they spawn. Failure to kill these cancer stem cells might explain why therapies that kill a large fraction of the tumor burden fail to cure cancer.
The evidence for cancer stem cells has come largely from experiments in which cells from primary mouse tumors are transplanted into different mice. Critics have argued that such experiments do not reflect the normal biology of how cancers …