Wang Shunyou
Department of Pharmacology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Methods Mol Biol. 2009;568:151-60. doi: 10.1007/978-1-59745-280-9_9.
Prostate cancer is a major health concern in the Western world. Prostate cancer stem cells have been implicated to be involved in, if not solely responsible for prostate cancer initiation and relapse after surgical, hormonal, and chemotherapy. Until now, the identity of the presumed prostate cancer stem cell has been illusive and the efforts to characterize such cells have been hampered by the lack of efficient prostate stem cell activity assay. Anchorage-independent growth of brain and mammary stem cells in vitro has been proved to be a useful tool to enrich and characterize neural and mammary stem cells. Recently, we have successfully established a prostosphere cultivation method employing strategies similar to neurosphere and mammosphere cultures. Our results demonstrate that prostosphere-forming cells possess stem cell characters and are significantly over-represented in cancer tissues.
前列腺癌是西方世界主要的健康问题。前列腺癌干细胞即便不是唯一导致前列腺癌发生及手术、激素和化疗后复发的原因，也被认为与之有关。到目前为止，假定的前列腺癌干细胞的身份一直难以捉摸，而对这类细胞进行特征描述的努力因缺乏有效的前列腺干细胞活性检测方法而受阻。已证明脑和乳腺干细胞在体外的非贴壁生长是富集和鉴定神经及乳腺干细胞的有用工具。最近，我们成功建立了一种前列腺球培养方法，该方法采用了与神经球和乳腺球培养类似的策略。我们的结果表明，形成前列腺球的细胞具有干细胞特征，并且在癌组织中显著富集。
