| Summary: | Cancer is becoming the leading cause of death
all around the world. To develop better therapeutic options against cancer, we
need a thorough understanding of tumor development and dissemination. As our
knowledge increases, it becomes apparent that cancer is a very complex disease
and this complexity is partially due to the great level of heterogeneity even
within the same tumor mass. Therefore, there is a pressing need to decipher
complex regulations and interactions of the tumor cells that lead to different
hierarchies. Concepts of tumor-initiating and self-renewing stem cell have long
been proposed to explain the emergence of a vast number of progenies within
monoclonal neoplastic growth. It is now known that cancer stem cells which are
found in many cancers have many roles in tumor development and dissemination.
Many fascinating properties of cancer stem cells draw further attention to
clarify their involvement in tumor cell plasticity, epithelial to mesenchymal
transition, chemotherapy resistance and to develop therapeutic strategies for
their targeting. Here we summarized recent efforts to illustrate the progress in
our understanding of the biology of cancer stem cells.
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