Division of Genetics, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 300 Longwood Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
J Clin Invest. 2010 Jan;120(1):41-50. doi: 10.1172/JCI41004.
Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are a subpopulation of tumor cells that selectively possess tumor initiation and self-renewal capacity and the ability to give rise to bulk populations of nontumorigenic cancer cell progeny through differentiation. As we discuss here, they have been prospectively identified in several human malignancies, and their relative abundance in clinical cancer specimens has been correlated with malignant disease progression in human patients. Furthermore, recent findings suggest that clinical cancer progression driven by CSCs may contribute to the failure of existing therapies to consistently eradicate malignant tumors. Therefore, CSC-directed therapeutic approaches might represent translationally relevant strategies to improve clinical cancer therapy, in particular for those malignancies that are currently refractory to conventional anticancer agents directed predominantly at tumor bulk populations.
癌症干细胞（CSCs）是肿瘤细胞中的一个亚群，它们具有选择性地起始肿瘤和自我更新的能力，并能够通过分化产生大量非致瘤性肿瘤细胞后代。正如我们在这里讨论的，它们已经在几种人类恶性肿瘤中被前瞻性地识别出来，并且它们在临床肿瘤标本中的相对丰度与人类患者恶性疾病的进展相关。此外，最近的研究结果表明，由 CSCs 驱动的临床癌症进展可能导致现有治疗方法无法持续根除恶性肿瘤。因此，针对 CSC 的治疗方法可能代表着改善临床癌症治疗的转化相关策略，特别是对于那些目前对主要针对肿瘤群体的常规抗癌药物具有抗性的恶性肿瘤。
