Schulte Lucas-Alexander, López-Gil Juan Carlos, Sainz Bruno, Hermann Patrick C
Department of Internal Medicine I, Ulm University, 89081 Ulm, Germany.
Department of Biochemistry, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (UAM), 28029 Madrid, Spain.
Cancers (Basel). 2020 Mar 14;12(3):684. doi: 10.3390/cancers12030684.
The recognition of intra-tumoral cellular heterogeneity has given way to the concept of the cancer stem cell (CSC). According to this concept, CSCs are able to self-renew and differentiate into all of the cancer cell lineages present within the tumor, placing the CSC at the top of a hierarchical tree. The observation that these cells-in contrast to bulk tumor cells-are able to exclusively initiate new tumors, initiate metastatic spread and resist chemotherapy implies that CSCs are solely responsible for tumor recurrence and should be therapeutically targeted. Toward this end, dissecting and understanding the biology of CSCs should translate into new clinical therapeutic approaches. In this article, we review the CSC concept in cancer, with a special focus on hepatocellular carcinoma.
对肿瘤内细胞异质性的认识已让位于癌症干细胞（CSC）的概念。根据这一概念，癌症干细胞能够自我更新并分化为肿瘤内所有存在的癌细胞谱系，将癌症干细胞置于层级树的顶端。与大量肿瘤细胞相比，这些细胞能够专门启动新肿瘤、引发转移扩散并抵抗化疗，这一观察结果表明癌症干细胞是肿瘤复发的唯一原因，应该成为治疗靶点。为此，剖析和理解癌症干细胞的生物学特性应转化为新的临床治疗方法。在本文中，我们回顾了癌症中的癌症干细胞概念，特别关注肝细胞癌。
