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Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
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Editor’s note: With the advent of more and more evidence suggesting the presence of a breast cancer stem cell (SC), it is becoming clear that breast cancer therapies need to be designed to target the SC as well as the bulk of the tumor. Present treatments have been compared to mowing down the leaves of a dandelion – the weed disappears for a while but, because the roots have not been touched, it will eventually return. New therapeutic agents are now often identified by high-throughput screening. In these assays, thousands of compounds can be screened for efficacy. However, because cancer SCs are only present as a small proportion of the cells within a tumor, screening for agents that can kill the SCs has not be compatible with high-throughput screening. In this article, the authors describe a method that can overcome this problem.