Journal of Carcinogenesis & Mutagenesis

Abstract

Evolving Concept of Cancer Stem Cells: Role of Micro-RNAs and their Implications in Tumor Aggressiveness

Seema Sethi and Fazlul H. Sarkar

Recent advances in cancer stem cell (CSC) research and the role of miroRNAs (miRNAs) provided renewed interest, as supported by some convincing data showing that deregulation of miRNAs are important molecular events in the maintenance of CSC niche, which contribute to therapeutic resistance, resulting in treatment failure. Therefore, we are succinctly providing state-of-the-art knowledge on miRNAs that are associated with CSCs in this article, and it is quite clear that CSCs and miRNAs are implicated in therapeutic resistance, suggesting that novel approaches must be devised to eliminate CSCs or drug resistant cells focusing on overcoming therapeutic resistance. This indeed could be achieved by targeted strategies either to re-express the lost miRNAs or inactivate over-expressed miRNAs in cancers in general and CSCs in particular. We sincerely hope that this article would be educational to attract innovative research in the field so that we can find specific novel approaches to eradicate cancer by overcoming therapeutic resistance by targeting miRNAs, which will be useful to eliminate tumor recurrence and metastasis.