The top medical researchers are now exploring how cells become cancerous, multiply uncontrollably, and form into tumors and what the essential role of aberrant embryonic stem cells play. These days, many researchers are establishing a clear link between different types of cancers and their embryonic origins. They also get to know new concepts that can be considered in future drug discovery projects and used in standard chemotherapeutics in the clinic. It all has been published in Cell Chemical Biology, where the collaborative effort has been put in by researchers at the uOttawa Faculty of Medicine, McMaster University, and the University of Calgary. Here, Dr. Yannick Benoit is the paper’s co-first author and Dr. Luca Orlando is the postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Dr. Mick Bhatia at McMaster.
Dr Yannick Benoit talked about how cancer uses blueprints borrowed from embryonic stem cells to promote its propagation in the body and how his team sought to identify drugs that can force human embryonic stem cells to acquire adult tissue specification. Their whole observation was very compelling. Their team saw that drugs stimulating the formation of the embryonic nervous system were effective against brain tumors. He mentioned that molecules that have been promoting the acquisition of primitive gut features were best at blocking the formation of colon tumors. The embryonic cells that have been pushed by drugs have become fetal blood cells were the most effective at killing leukemia.
Dr Yannick Benoit said, “Ultimately, we observed that tumors in tissues with the same embryonic ancestry share similar molecular networks that can be targeted to eliminate cancer more effectively.” He is a principal investigator and assistant professor in the Faculty’s Cellular and Molecular Medicine (CMM) department. The completion and publishing of this study, by the whole team took many years. In 2012, they started the research process and at that time, Dr Benoit worked on portions of the project at McMaster before being recruited to uOttawa in 2017.
He said, “While this concept has been previously proposed over the ages based on observing dissected tumor tissues and inferred through modern computational analyses, our study is the first to provide an experimental demonstration of its applicability in cancer drug discovery. Our discovery re-emphasizes that cancer is not a single disease, but hundreds of different ones regrouped under the same name. At the end of our journey, we will not find ‘the cure’ for cancer. Instead, it will be distinct therapeutic avenues with variable chances of success, depending on the type of cancer afflicting a specific patient.”
Dr Yannick Benoit’s lab is at uOttawa which has the only aim to create novel anticancer agents and can simply target epigenetic features of colorectal cancer stem cells. It is actually developed to measure the effect of certain drugs on cancerous stem cells within colon tumor samples. Both the McMaster and University of Calgary groups were oriented on leukemia and brain tumors.
The team by working together to generalize their findings to 30 tumor types and their healthy tissue counterparts. They take the support of data sets that have been generated by researchers across the globe and are available to the scientific community. After being asked about the next steps for Dr Benoit’s uOttawa lab, he said, “My lab keeps running searches for candidate drugs to destroy cancer stem cell populations in colon tumors. Most of our projects start with testing on human embryonic stem cells to see if our compounds of interest alter molecular signatures of early human development.”
