So why would cancerous cells, that act abnormally to a normal healthy cell, be used in all these studies?
In: Biology
Historically speaking, we just couldn’t grow human cells outside the body at all for a long time. Researchers lucked into the tumor cells from Henrietta Lacks and found they were functionally immortalized and could be grown in the lab. Our options at that point were basically no human cell lines or HeLa cells, so if studies needed to be done with human cells, they were used and became very popular.
Slowly but surely, we started developing other immortalized human and mammalian cells lines. Some were developed from other cancerous cells, and some were developed from stem cells such as those found in fetuses and embryos. As our options grew, we deviated away from HeLa cells in some places, but we had so much historical data and protocols using HeLa cells that they continued to stick around.
Today, we’ve even learned to make stem cells ourselves from other cell lines, and these “induced” stem cells are also functionally immortal cell lines.
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