BioCentury
ARTICLE | Translation in Brief

Trans-hemispheric express

Programming stem cells to fight brain cancer

March 17, 2016 7:00 AM UTC

A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill team has made human neural progenitor cells directly from fibroblasts and shown the transdifferentiated cells can serve as tumor-homing carriers of chemotherapeutic agents for brain cancer.

While the findings, which were published last month in Nature Communications, are not the first to suggest that neural progenitors can be harnessed to fight brain tumors, the use of transdifferentiated cells takes an important step towards creating autologous cell therapies - a likely requirement for translating the system into patients. ...