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Title A novel and generalizable organotypic slice platform to evaluate stem cell potential for targeting pediatric brain tumors
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Li, Shengwen Calvin Loudon, William Gunter |
| Copyright Year | 2008 |
| Abstract | Brain tumors are now the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in children under age 15. Malignant gliomas are, for all practical purposes, incurable and new therapeutic approaches are desperately needed. One emerging strategy is to use the tumor tracking capacity inherent in many stem cell populations to deliver therapeutic agents to the brain cancer cells. Current limitations of the stem cell therapy strategy include that stem cells are treated as a single entity and lack of uniform technology is adopted for selection of clinically relevant sub-populations of stem cells. Specifically, therapeutic success relies on the selection of a clinically competent stem cell population based on their capacity of targeting brain tumors. A novel and generalizable organotypic slice platform to evaluate stem cell potential for targeting pediatric brain tumors is proposed to fill the gap in the current work flow of stem cell-based therapy. The organotypic slice platform has advantages of being mimic in vivo model, easier to manipulate to optimize parameters than in vivo models such as rodents and primates. This model serves as a framework to address the discrepancy between anticipated in vivo results and actual in vivo results, a critical barrier to timely progress in the field of the use of stem cells for the treatment of neurological disorders. Introduction: current challenges in treatment of pediatric brain tumors Over 1.4 million people in the United States were diagnosed with cancer in 2007 and the national cost of the disease was over $206 billion in 2006, accounting one-thirds of healthcare dollars (total: $686 billion) spent in the U.S. [1,2]. An estimated 18,820 new cases of brain cancer was diagnosed in the United States of America in 2006, and more than 12,000 would die from the disease (data from the National Cancer Institute of the United States of America). Our current forms of therapy for these diseases are brain surgery followed by administration of toxic drugs and exposure to radiation, which lead that the patients face challenges due to both the effects of treatment and potential neurological dysfunction. Overall the cost of care per patient was $67,887 with accrued mean monthly health care costs that were 20 times higher than demographically similar individuals without cancer ($6364 vs. $277)[3]. Primary malignant tumors such as high grade gliomas diffusely migrate into the brain early in the disease course, Published: 22 May 2008 Cancer Cell International 2008, 8:19 doi:10.1186/1475-2867-8-9 Received: 18 September 2007 Accepted: 22 May 2008 This article is available from: http://www.cancerci.com/content/8/1/9 © 2008 Calvin Li and Loudon; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt0kx5s9th/qt0kx5s9th.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
