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ROME (ANSA) - Italian scientists have found the mutant stem cell that acts as the catalyst for colon cancer, the second most deadly tumour in the Western world.

The Higher Health Institute (ISS) team that conducted the research says the breakthrough could lead to the development of 'smart' anti-tumour medicines capable of targeting this cell. The ISS study focused on a group of colon-cancer cells containing a protein called CD133.

While these cells formed only a handful of the tumour's cell population - 2% - the biologists realized that they were the ones that kept the cancer alive and made it spread.

"We cultivated the stem cells and the other colon cancer cells in vitro," explained Ruggero De Maria, the leader of the team.

"The second group, which made up 98% of the tumour cells, grew for a period of two weeks maximum and then stopped multiplying.

"The first group, on the other hand, kept growing non-stop. They have been in our laboratory for a year and a half now and they are still going".

The team injected the CD133 protein cells into laboratory mice, which subsequently developed the cancer.

"In this way we saw that only the CD133 cells were capable of forming tumours and that they should be the target of future therapies for colon cancer," added De Maria. The results of the ISS study have been published in the latest edition of international science journal Nature.

Colon cancer, the second most lethal form of tumour after lung cancer, is usually treated with surgery and chemotherapy. But this breakthrough means it will join the list of pathologies researchers hope to tackle with smart anti-cancer drugs that go to the source by attacking the so-called 'seed cells'. The ISS team previously found similar aberrant stem cells in brain tumour tissue.

Other groups have found cancerous stem-like cells in breast tumours, leukaemia, prostate, bone, ovarian and skin cancers.

Colon cancer - or colorectal cancer or bowel cancer - is the name for cancerous growths that develop in the colon, rectum and appendix.

When diagnosed quickly survival rates are high.

However, patients often do not show any symptoms until the later stages of the cancer's development, when it is harder to treat. This is why colon cancer claims so many lives. Symptoms include unexplained constipation or diarrhoea, persistent rectal bleeding, severe pain in the abdomen and fatigue for no obvious cause.

http://www.ansa.it/site/notizie/awnplus/english/news/2006-11-20_12020080.html