Niche Articles

While modern therapies for metastatic prostate cancer (PCa) have improved survival they are associated with an increasingly prevalent entity, aggressive variant PCa (AVPCa), lacking androgen receptor (AR) expression, enriched for cancer stem cells (CSCs), and evidencing epithelial-mesenchymal plasticity with a varying extent of neuroendocrine transdifferentiation.

Very small embryonic-like stem cells (VSELs) exist among spermatogonial stem cells and survive chemotherapy in both mice and human testes because of their relatively quiescent nature. Our earlier study revealed that inter-tubular transplantation of niche (Sertoli or bone marrow derived mesenchymal) cells can restore spermatogenesis from endogenous surviving VSELs.