Tackling the cancer stem cells – what challenges do they pose?

By D. Pattabiraman, R. Weinberg. Nature reviews. Drug discovery, 2014

925 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since their identification in 1994, cancer stem cells (CSCs) have been objects of intensive study. Their properties and mechanisms of formation have become a major focus of current cancer research, in part because of their enhanced ability to initiate and drive tumour growth and their intrinsic resistance to conventional therapeutics. The discovery that activation of the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) programme in carcinoma cells can give rise to cells with stem-like properties has provided one possible mechanism explaining how CSCs arise and presents a possible avenue for their therapeutic manipulation. Here we address recent developments in CSC research, focusing on carcinomas that are able to undergo EMT. We discuss the signalling pathways that create these cells, cell-intrinsic mechanisms that could be exploited for selective elimination or induction of their differentiation, and the role of the tumour microenvironment in sustaining them. Finally, we propose ways to use our current knowledge of the complex biology of CSCs to design novel therapies to eliminate them.

Subfields: Cell Biology, Molecular Biology, Oncology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/94d5659d6899db31ab055e2aaed27baeab073177

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Citations in the corpus

• Targeting cancer stem cell pathways for cancer therapy (2020, background): “SP cells have high homology, self-renewal and multidirectional differentiation potential.(47,48) Some reports have shown that ABCG2 is highly expressed in SP cells.”
• xCell: digitally portraying the tissue cellular heterogeneity landscape (2017, methodology): “Second, current methods focus on only a very narrow range of the tumor microenvironment, usually a subset of immune cell types, and thus do not account for the further richness of cell types in the microenvironment, including blood vessels and other different forms of cell subsets [14, 15].”
• The interaction between ferroptosis and lipid metabolism in cancer (2020, background): “Salinomycin is a Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy (2020) 5:108 selective drug that targets CSCs.144 Ironomycin (AM5), a synthetic derivative of salinomycin, shows a more potent selective activity against breast CSCs through accumulating and sequestrating of iron in lysosomes, resulting in th”
• Cancer Stem Cells (CSCs) in Drug Resistance and their Therapeutic Implications in Cancer Treatment (2018, background): “Lately, some classes of Notch pathway inhibitors have been reported to enter a clinical trial, accompanied by a substantial variety of targets, mechanism of action, and drug classes [19, 21].”