Guest Editors
Assoc. Prof. Alvin Y. Liu
Email: aliu@uw.edu
Affiliation: Department of Urology, Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, United States
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Research Interests: differentiation, intercellular communication, carcinogenesis, metastasis, immunotherapy, differentiation therapy, reprogramming, tissue repair/renewal
Summary
The concept of cancer stem cells (CSC) maintains that a small population of cancer cells endowed with stem cell properties is responsible for cancer development, initiation, growth, and spread. Successful treatment depends on targeting these cells. Research emphasizes their identification and isolation for biomolecular study, functional analysis of their behavior, response to differentiation signaling, and their prevalence in solid tumor types. The parallel between normal and cancer differentiation suggests that cancer could arise from defects in cellular maturation. Questions to consider include: are CSC exclusively responsible for tumor metastasis, do CSC arise because of accumulation of genome changes, are CSC responsive to differentiation signaling, what is the lineage relationship between CSC and non-CSC, can differentiation therapy serve as a viable treatment strategy, do CSC of different organ tumor types have a similar gene expression, as CSC are stem-like do they show plasticity in response to different tissue-specific signaling, do aneuploidy and genome changes affect cancer cell differentiation and dedifferentiaton, do CSC-specific markers exist and can be used for disease stratification and correlation with patient outcome.
Keywords
cancer stem cell, differentiation, dedifferentiation, reprogramming, intercellular communication, signaling molecules, stem cell factors
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