Seven-year study pays off with 'most detailed' picture of head and neck cancer stem cells to date
"We wanted to determine the relationships between key genetic alterations and how head and neck cancer stem cells harness those alterations to drive initiation and growth," says CU Cancer Center investigator Antonio Jimeno, MD, PhD, the Daniel and Janet Mordecai endowed professor for cancer stem cell research, director of the University of Colorado School of Medicine's Head and Neck Cancer Clinical Research Program, and the paper's senior author. The current project was performed in collaboration with the Gates Center for Regenerative Medicine of which Dr. Jimeno is a faculty member. Jimeno started his work with cancer stem cells as a post-doc at Johns Hopkins University, but as he explains, "I focused on head and neck cancer stem cells because there has been an increase in head and neck cancer incidence of about fifty percent over the past ten years in the U.S. and we need to better understand what is at the root of this disease ." Previously, a major c...