The Cancer Stem Cell Niche: How Essential is the Niche in Regulating Stemness of Tumor Cells?

By V. Plaks, Niwen Kong, Zena Werb. Cell Stem Cell, 2015

1,394 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are tumor cells that have the principal properties of self-renewal, clonal tumor initiation capacity and clonal long-term repopulation potential. CSCs reside in niches, which are anatomically distinct regions within the tumor microenvironment. These niches maintain the principle properties of CSCs, preserve their phenotypic plasticity, protect them from the immune system and facilitate their metastatic potential. In this perspective, we focus on the CSC niche and discuss its contribution to tumor initiation and progression. Since CSCs survive many commonly employed cancer therapies, we examine the prospects of targeting the niche components as preferable therapeutic targets.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cancer Research, Oncology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48fe194e06e83bde8a935bb141ab442ded8feb6b

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In Cancer Research

1. Yuhe Huang
2. Xiawei Wei
3. Weiqi Hong

In Oncology

1. E. Song
2. Yuhe Huang
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4. Weiqi Hong

Citations in the corpus

• Implications of the Hybrid Epithelial/Mesenchymal Phenotype in Metastasis (2015, background): “Cell–cell communication among cancer cells and/or between cancer cells and stromal cells (fibroblasts, immune cells, endothelial cells, etc.) can have a significant influence on phenotypic plasticity (EMT/MET), CSC self-renewal, and a dynamic equilibrium between CSCs and non-CSCs ( 125, 128).”
• The molecular mechanisms and therapeutic strategies of EMT in tumor progression and metastasis (2022, background): “Signals of EMT‐induced stemness CSC are tumor cells with key characteristics of selfrenewal, tumor initiation potential, and clonal long-term repopulation potential and are a small subset of malignant cells in tumors [252].”
• Targeting cancer stem cell pathways for cancer therapy (2020, background): “651 Fourth, the environmental factors in CSC niches are not well understood, and the relationship between TAMs/CAFs and CSCs has not been well studied.”
• CD10+GPR77+ Cancer-Associated Fibroblasts Promote Cancer Formation and Chemoresistance by Sustaining Cancer Stemness. (2018, positive): “Additionally, the eliminated CSCs may be replenished by non-CSCs in the presence of the supporting niche (Plaks et al., 2015), which may also undermine the therapeutic effects of directly targeting the CSCs.”