Researchers from the US and Japan have shown that an aggressive type of brain tumor can arise from normal cells in the central nervous system such as neurons. The cells revert to an earlier, undifferentiated stem cell stage, which can then reproduce prolifically. The international team of scientists, led by Professor Inder Verma and geneticist Dr Dinorah Friedmann Morvinski, both of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla in California, studied the development of malignant glioblastoma tumors in mice. They had earlier developed a new method of researching cancer by using viruses to introduce cancer-causing genes (oncogenes) into the mice brains, as reported in Phys.Org.
