Dwain Irvin, Xiangpeng Yuan, Zeng Zhaohui, Patricia Tunici, Joh S Yu
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute, Suite 800 East, 8631 West 3 Street, Los Angeles, California 90048, USA.
Curr Stem Cell Res Ther. 2006 Jan;1(1):79-84. doi: 10.2174/157488806775269070.
Brain tumors can be highly aggressive and debilitating for many patients and lead to an untimely death in just a few months. Unfortunately, due to the location of many brain tumors, therapy with ionizing radiation, chemotherapeutic agents and/or surgery has limited rewards. In addition, the probability of totally removing highly infiltrative tumors, particularly gliomas, is extremely low and rarely provides a cure. The need for directed targeting and ablation of tumors with minimal damage to nearby healthy tissue has lead to the most recent findings and uses of neural stem cells for therapeutic treatment of brain tumors. Recently, some very promising studies have demonstrated that exogenous neural stem cells have the remarkable ability to migrate very long distances towards sites of metastasis after transplantation. These studies also show that intravascular injections of neural stem cells may lead to preferential migration towards central nervous system tumors. It has also been demonstrated that genetically modified neural stem cells, engineered to produce anti-tumor molecules, upon transplantation, have the ability to migrate towards tumors and reduce tumor mass directly or through a "bystander" effect. Here we review the current literature examining the promise of utilizing genetically modified neural stem cells as vehicles for CNS tumor therapy.
脑肿瘤对许多患者来说可能具有高度侵袭性且使人虚弱，会在短短几个月内导致过早死亡。不幸的是，由于许多脑肿瘤的位置，电离辐射、化疗药物和/或手术治疗的效果有限。此外，完全切除高度浸润性肿瘤，尤其是胶质瘤的可能性极低，很少能实现治愈。需要在对附近健康组织造成最小损伤的情况下直接靶向和消融肿瘤，这导致了最近关于神经干细胞用于脑肿瘤治疗的研究结果和应用。最近，一些非常有前景的研究表明，外源性神经干细胞在移植后具有向转移部位远距离迁移的显著能力。这些研究还表明，血管内注射神经干细胞可能会导致其优先向中枢神经系统肿瘤迁移。研究还表明，经过基因改造以产生抗肿瘤分子的神经干细胞在移植后能够向肿瘤迁移，并直接或通过“旁观者”效应减少肿瘤体积。在此，我们综述了当前有关利用基因改造神经干细胞作为中枢神经系统肿瘤治疗载体前景的文献。
