Breakthroughs in Tumor Stem Cell Research

Tumor stem cells (TSCs) are rare immortal tumor cells exhibiting self-renewal properties similar to normal stem cells and therefore have the ability to infinitely give rise to the bulk of a tumor as the "seed" of the cancer. TSCs are found in various types of human tumors. They are responsible for tumor metastasis and are equipped with various resistance mechanisms against most conventional tumor treatments. Given their self-renewal characteristics, TSCs are often thought to be the major cause of tumor relapse. Thus, the presence of TSCs accounts for tumor initiation and maintenance, metastasis, recurrence, and therapeutic resistance.

Despite great strides recently achieved in improving cancer patient prognosis and survival, hurdles still remain due to the presence of TSCs and their contributions to tumor metastasis, therapy resistance, and cancer recurrence. Thus, targeting and eliminating TSCs would hold great promise towards taking down this disease. Whilst research on the development of new therapeutic strategies against TSCs is an ongoing endeavor, this research topic seeks to collect recent breakthroughs in understanding more of the molecular and cellular regulatory mechanisms of this adaptive nature, which will provide significant information for the future development of novel TSC-specific therapeutics.

All basic or clinical research articles that advance current knowledge of tumor stem cells are welcome to submit. Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:

• Plasticity of bulk tumor cells to de-differentiate to tumor stem cells or vice versa
• Identification of novel cell surface molecular markers of tumor stem cells
• Signaling pathways linked to self-renewal, differentiation, metastasis, and therapeutic resistance
• Metabolism in tumor stem cells and the metabolic interplay between tumor stem cells and stromal niche in the microenvironment
• Hormonal regulation of tumor stem cells
• Immune surveillance, suppression or escape of tumor stem cells
• Small molecule therapeutics against tumor stem cells
• Multi-omics approaches and/or computational algorithms to dissect and predict genome integrity of tumor stem cells