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Med Oncol (2014) 31:69DOI 10.1007/s12032-014-0069-6
REVIEW ARTICLE
Cancer stem cell detection and isolation
Meysam Moghbeli Faezeh Moghbeli
Mohammad Mahdi Forghanifard
Mohammad Reza Abbaszadegan
Received: 15 May 2014 / Accepted: 4 June 2014 / Published online: 27 July 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract Only 10 % of cancer-related deaths result from primary tumors; most are caused by metastatic tumors. It is believed that the metastatic power of tumor cells is attributed to features of a stem cell-like subpopulation of tumor cells known as cancer stem cells (CSCs). Cancer stem cells are resistant to chemotherapeutic treatments and can induce dormancy in tumor cells for long periods. Detection, isolation, and characterization of CSCs in solid tumors are hallmarks of cancer-targeted therapies in recent years. There are inevitable similarities between normal and cancer stem cells; therefore, nding specic methods or markers to differentiate them is critical to cancer therapies. Considering CSCs involvement in tumor relapse and chemotherapeutic resistance, identication of such cells in tumors is imperative for effective targeted therapy. The present review introduces practical and specic protocols used to isolate CSCs from solid tumors from colon, esophagus, liver, breast, brain, and cervix.
Keywords Cancer stem cell Isolation Detection
Targeted therapy Surface marker Tumor relapse
Introduction
Tumor microenvironment plays an important role in cell behavior and tumorigenesis [1]. This network consists of different cell populations with normal and tumor cells in contact with each other. Within a tumor, only a minor subset of tumor cells are able to proliferate and divide unlimitedly to generate the tumor mass. This sub-population, dened as cancer stem cells (CSCs), shares many features with normal stem cells, including activation of major cell signaling pathways such as Wnt, Notch, Hedgehog, and others. Deregulation of some of these important signaling pathways in CSCs is involved in tumorigenesis [2, 3]; however, CSCs behave like normal stem cells in many other aspects such as membrane transport, DNA repair, and the ability to regulate self-renewal and differentiate in response to oncogenic mutations and external stimulations. Therefore, they are often resistant to treatments designed to limit high cell division rates [4, 5]. Because CSCs are a rare subset of tumor cells, comprising only approximately 1 and 2 % of tumor cells in leukemia and breast cancer,...