What is Prostate: its anatomy and epithelial organization?
The prostate is a part and parcel of the reproductive system of male that oozes fluid and leads to the formation of the semen. One can suffer from prostate cancer.
Cancer stem cells are cells found within a tumor that does possess the capacity to self-renew and to cause the heterogeneous lineages of the cancer cells that do comprise the tumor.
Advances in culture techniques have allowed researchers to grow prostate cells in a 3D matrix, where they tend to form structures that are termed as prostaspheres. This culture system does rely on the presence of stem and progenitor cells, which do regenerate the prostate glandular structure in this 3D in vitro system.
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed in male patients and the second one does lead to the malignancy of the cancer-related deaths that have occurred in Europe and the United States. Most patients who have suffered and are suffering from the advanced stages of the disease that do respond to the current treatment i.e. (hormonal therapy, radiotherapy, or even chemotherapy) which happens to be only in the initial stages.
- Many tissues in one’s body do retain the adult stem cells that are responsible for the maintenance of the tissue homeostasis as well as tissue renewal. The stem cell population is no doubt typically composed of rare cells that are usually identified on the basis of two primary characteristics:
- Self-renewal, and the capacity also to be able to give rise to all the differentiated cell types of the tissue in which they do reside.
- Adult stem cell populations are rather difficult to be identified in vivo and are also much defined by the unique cell surface markers.
- In the animal models, or in vitro, stem cells can be thus identified making use of the lineage labeling techniques.
The initial evidence does confirm the hypothesis of the existence of cancer stem cells that do derive from the 1990s and is also based on the study of blood diseases such as acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Subsequent research also indicates the presence of cancer stem cells found also in other types of tumors, inter alia, prostate cancer. There are controversies about whether the cancerous stem cell that maybe the root cell of cancer and the most crucial target in the treatment of the disease. Therefore, the understanding of the biology prostate cancer does allow this cell type to be eliminated by targeted therapy, thus leading to required improvement in therapeutic outcome.
Prostate cancer research will provide for the patients with a better therapeutic effect option.
More about Stem Cells and Cancer Stem Cells (CSC):
- Stem cells are more of immature cells that are characterized by the significant proliferative properties, self-renewal, as well as the potential to differentiate into required specialized cells in a tissue.
- Stem cell division may either be symmetric or asymmetric. A stem cell during asymmetric division does give rise to one particular mother cell that is considered to be identical to the origin of the cell.
- The population of stem cells remains constant.
- The other type of division results in two identical stem cells and it is defined as symmetric. Fundamentally, there are two kinds of normal stem cells:
- Embryonic which are pluripotent and can give rise to all cell types.
- Non-embryonic stem cells with a limited potential to differentiate into other cell types.
Methods have been followed to isolate prostate cancer stem cells , particularly potential stem cells from other tissue types, and thus be able to define and identify characteristics of this population .
One can observe the fact that the prostate epithelial cells are actually optimized for the growth in ProstaLife medium and can grown in 3D matrices as spheroid cultures.
