Isolation and use of solid tumor stem cells

Patent Number: 7,115,360

The cancer stem cell is very important since there is numerous investigators in the field that believe the majority of cancer cells making up a tumor mass are only the products of a specific cell subpopulation with high repopulating potential. What this means is that usually the drugs developed for cancer are developed to kill not the stem cell of the tumor, but actually the progeny of the tumor stem cell. This means (if the theory is correct) that the majority of cancer treatments are bound to fail since they do not address the cell subpopulation that maintains to other tumor cells.

This patent covers methods of detecting compounds that are capable of killing the cancer stem cell.

The patent is focus on cancer stem cells from epithelial tumors that have the phenotype of CD44+ and lineage negative. Specific lineage markers that are not found on cancer stem cells include CD2, CD3, CD10, CD14, CD16, CD31, CD45, CD64, and CD140b: according to this patent.

View this patent on the USPTO website.