The Effects of Hemodynamic Shear Stress on Stemness of Acute Myelogenous Leukemia

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) have recently been identified as the root cause of tumors generated from cancer cell populations. This is because these CSCs are drug-resistant and have the ability to self-renew and differentiate. These qualities of CSCs makes them very important in developing effective cancer therapies; however, current methods of culturing CSCs require much time and money, so cancer cell culture protocols that maximize yield of CSCs are needed. Shear stress applied to breast cancer cells in a bioreactor was shown to increase the tumorsphere formation ability of the cells, which is directly related to stemness of the cancer cell population. Based on this previous research, it was hypothesized that the quantity of acute myelogenous leukemia stem cells (LSCs) would increase after applying shear stress to the leukemia cells. Shear stress was applied by pumping the cells through narrow tubing to mimic the in vivo bloodstream environment. In support of the hypothesis, shear stress was found to increase the amount of LSCs in a given leukemia population.