Cancer Stem Cells: Powerful Targets to Improve Current Anticancer Therapeutics

Figure 1

Targeting cancer stem cells signaling to overcome resistance of current anticancer therapy. While the conventional chemotherapy and radiotherapy eliminate more differentiated cancer cells, specific phenotypes of CSC (i.e., multidrug resistance, epigenetic reprogramming, and tumor microenvironment protection) allow them to evade the conventional treatments and avoid the cell death. Once CSC population accumulates, after conventional therapy, they start to regrowth the tumor promoting cancer recurrence. To avoid recurrence, a more efficient therapeutic regimen purposes the administration of new drugs that directly target CSC metabolism, self-renewal, differentiation or other stem cell particularities to disrupt CSC, concomitant with conventional therapies to eliminate differentiated cells.