Cancer Stem Cells: Biological Features and Targeted Therapeutics

Abstract

Advance in stem cells (SCs) has become significant by the isolation of the tissue-specific SCs in a tissue, because it is the beginning of using SC utility for regenerative medicine. Likewise in SCs, a small subpopulation of cancer cells, named cancer stem cells (CSCs), also have similar properties. These properties include indefinite self-renewal potential and sharing similar signaling pathways with normal SCs, because the originality of CSCs is from the mutation of normal SCs. Hierarchically, CSCs in solid tumors may organize from the normal SCs in the highest cellular hierarchy of these cancer cells. The functional assay techniques to assess the differentiation frequency of normal SCs are similarly used in CSCs to sustain tumor growth and recurrence after therapy. In this review, we discuss the different parallels between adult SCs and CSCs in solid cancer disease and applications toward targeted therapy in use of molecular level on CSCs.