Breast Cancer Stem Cells Transition between Epithelial and Mesenchymal States Reflective of their Normal Counterparts

By Suling Liu, Yang Cong, Dong Wang, Yu Sun, Lu Deng, Yajing Liu, Rachel Martin-Trevino, L. Shang, S. McDermott, M. Landis and 11 more. Stem Cell Reports, 2013

973 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Previous studies have suggested that breast cancer stem cells (BCSCs) mediate metastasis, are resistant to radiation and chemotherapy, and contribute to relapse. Although several BCSC markers have been described, it is unclear whether these markers identify the same or independent BCSCs. Here, we show that BCSCs exist in distinct mesenchymal-like (epithelial-mesenchymal transition [EMT]) and epithelial-like (mesenchymal-epithelial transition [MET]) states. Mesenchymal-like BCSCs characterized as CD24−CD44+ are primarily quiescent and localized at the tumor invasive front, whereas epithelial-like BCSCs express aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH), are proliferative, and are located more centrally. The gene-expression profiles of mesenchymal-like and epithelial-like BCSCs are remarkably similar across different molecular subtypes of breast cancer, and resemble those of distinct basal and luminal stem cells found in the normal breast. We propose that the plasticity of BCSCs that allows them to transition between EMT- and MET-like states endows these cells with the capacity for tissue invasion, dissemination, and growth at metastatic sites.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Oncology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5dc864af43c95932d4794efaefd8280d9642241a

How researchers see this paper

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In Molecular Biology

1. R. Huang
2. Tetsuo Noda
3. Yoshio Miki
4. T. Tan
5. S. Mori
6. Q. H. Miow
7. Herbert Levine
8. J. P. Thiery

In Oncology

1. R. Huang
2. Tetsuo Noda
3. Yoshio Miki
4. T. Tan
5. S. Mori
6. Q. H. Miow
7. J. P. Thiery
8. Yuhe Huang

Citations in the corpus

• The molecular mechanisms and therapeutic strategies of EMT in tumor progression and metastasis (2022, background): “Recent studies have shown that the activity of CD44high and ALDH1 do not usually coexist in CSC, which reveals the presence of different types of CSC [248].”
• Implications of the Hybrid Epithelial/Mesenchymal Phenotype in Metastasis (2015, background): “Importantly, these studies show that most epithelial-like CSCs (identified by ALDH + by Liu et al. (151) and by CD44 high EPCAM high by Biddle et al. (152)) can give rise to both epithelial-like and mesenchymal-like populations and hence bilineage colonies in vitro .”
• Epithelial-mesenchymal transition spectrum quantification and its efficacy in deciphering survival and drug responses of cancer patients (2014, positive): “In addition, the existence of different types of stem cells within a cancer — as shown in breast cancers — has to be taken into account when considering the correlation of stemness and EMT (Liu et al , 2014).”