Normal and leukemic stem cells.

Abstract

Studies on hematopoietic stem cells have provided several critical insights in the biology of stem cells in general; as mature blood cells are generally short lived, stem cells are in fact required to guarantee, throughout the life of an organism, the replenishment of differentiated blood cells by the generation of multi-lineage progenitors and precursors committed to individual hematopoietic lineages. Similarly, acute myeloid leukemia has been considered as a model system to study cancer stem cells. This presentation illustrates some recent results obtained by our group with regard to both normal and leukemic stem cells.