Role in Cancer
Understanding more about ESCs is important in cancer research. Tumours induce angiogenesis, which is the formation of new blood vessels. These cancerous cells do this by secreting factors such as VEGF and by reducing the amount of PGK, an anti-VEGF enzyme. The result is an uncontrolled production of beta-catenin, which regulates cell growth and cell mobility. With uncontrolled beta-catenin, the cell loses its adhesive properties. As ECs get packed together to create the lining for a new blood vessel, a single cancer cell is able to travel through the vessel to a distant site. If that cancer cell implants itself and begins forming a new tumour, the cancer has metastasized.
Read more about this topic: Endothelial Stem Cell
Famous quotes containing the words role in, role and/or cancer:
“If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.”
—Betty Friedan (20th century)
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—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)
“I wish more and more that health were studied half as much as disease is. Why, with all the endowment of research against cancer is no study made of those who are free from cancer? Why not inquire what foods they eat, what habits of body and mind they cultivate? And why never study animals in health and natural surroundings? why always sickened and in an environment of strangeness and artificiality?”
—Sarah N. Cleghorn (1976–1959)