Investigating the Removal of Stemness from Cancer Cells

Most types of cancer are made dangerous by malignancy and metastasis, the ability to grow and spread rapidly. For many cancers these capabilities have been shown to be driven by a comparatively small population of cancer stem cells. One of the possibilities arising from the growing knowledge of stem cell biology is to turn off the stemness of cancer cells, reprogramming them to cease aggressive replication. As this paper indicates, however, efforts on this front are still in the very early stages of research: Metastasis is the major factor responsible for the lethality of malignant breast cancer in human patients. Although various targeted and non-targeted therapies can occasionally control the progress of breast cancer, a significant portion of patients develop resistance to chemotherapy and experience metastatic recurrence. The epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT), a key developmental program in embryogenesis, has been found to be closely intertwined with the occurrence of metastasis in various human cancers. EMT can be prompted by the expression of multiple transcriptional factors and is controlled by several signaling pathways. Towards the goal of understanding breast cancer metastasis, our group performed a cross-species expression profiling and identified Foxq1 as an EMT- and metastasis-promoting gene in breast cancer. Following this discovery, Foxq1 expression has been shown to promote EMT and metastasis in a wide array of human cancers. In line with the previo...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs