Decoding Cancer Stem Cells: A Game Change in Oncology Therapeutics

The objective of this article is to identify cancer stem cells (CSCs) as a more critical target than cancer cells (CCs) to achieve cancer therapy. To effectively solve cancer, it is essential to identify the most critical issue and to use the right medicine to solve the problem. The inability to solve cancer is due to inadequacies in existing oncology approaches, resulting in a global mortality exceeding 10 million annually. Cancer stem cells became known in 1997. The discovery of cancer stem cells identified these cells as the most critical issue of cancer to initiate tumor growth and to cause fatal effects of cancer. Thus, the elimination of CSCs is very critical to the success of cancer therapy. Cancer establishments recognized the importance of CSCs, but they used wrong drugs to result in failure to solve this critical issue. Cancer evolves due to wound unhealing. Wound healing requires the proliferation and the terminal differentiation of progenitor stem cells (PSCs). Wound unhealing is attributable to the collapse of chemo-surveillance which is the nature’s creation to ensure perfection of wound healing to avoid disastrous consequences of wound unhealing, with cancer representing the most severe pathological consequence. Wound unhealing forces PSCs to evolve into CSCs. Thus, the appearance of CSCs is critically linked to wound unhealing. Therefore, induction of terminal differentiation is the only option to solve CSCs. Myelodysplastic syndromes (MDSs) are diseases attributable entirely to CSCs, which are a model to test the effectiveness of drugs against CSCs. Cell differentiation agent-2 (CDA-2), which is a drug of wound healing metabolites purified from urine we produced, is the best drug for the therapy of MDSs. CDA formulations patterned after CDA-2 are perfect cancer drugs to achieve life-long survivor of cancer patients through elimination of CSCs and CCs by induction of terminal differentiation and restoration of chemo-surveillance.

Keywords: Cancer Stem Cells, Cell Differentiation Agents, Chemo-Surveillance, Terminal Differentiation, Wound Healing.