Killing Cancer Stem Cells With Chemicals

In late 2009, a multi-institutional team of researchers from the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard discovered an exciting new chemical that specifically targets aggressive cells within breast cancers that normally have the ability to seed new tumors; these cells are otherwise known as cancer stem cells. The general concept is that most medical practitioners and scientists believe that these specific cancer stem cells allow cancer to spread throughout the body, possibly reemerging after treatments that otherwise seem successful.