Question: Do you think that stem cells could be used to kill cancer cells?

Ee Lyn Lim answered on 20 Jun 2013:

I…don’t think so, actually!

You can think of stem cells as sort of a new piece of modelling clay, and you can mould them into different kinds of cells (muscle cells, liver cells, blood cells, bone cells etc) as they grow. That means they’re very very useful for replacing parts of your body that get damaged, for example if you need an organ transplant. But none of these new cells – with one exception!* – will actually kill cancer cells!

*The one kind of cell that we CAN use to kill cancer is immune effector cells. They’re usually in charge of patrolling the body and finding infections, like bacteria or viruses, and getting rid of them, so we can use them to kill cancer cells too. But we don’t need to use stem cells for that! We can get these cells, already nicely grown up so that we don’t have to mould them anymore, just from the blood, then we can feed them good stuff in a petri dish so that they multiply into a big strong army. We then inject them back into the cancer patient, and off they go to do their job!

The only way I can think of to use stem cells to help cancer patients is by replacing some of the organs damaged by the cancer. For example if you had liver cancer, and you had to have surgery to take out your whole liver, you could then use stem cells to grow a liver back. Or if you had leukaemia, which is cancer in the bone marrow, you could use radiation to kill all the bad bone marrow cells, and then replace with them with new, healthy cells.