Cancer stem cellsSeeds of growth in osteosarcoma

摘要

Osteosarcoma (OS), the most common primary bone malignancy, is an aggressive and highly metastatic cancer that is often refractory to chemotherapy. Long term survival for patients following standard therapy, including surgery and multi-component chemotherapy, has reached an unacceptable plateau at less than 70%. The propensity for OS cells to survive, proliferate and metastasize even under the pressure of multimodal, aggressive chemotherapy treatment has prompted several investigators to explore the potential role of cancer stem cells (CSCs) in this disease. While the experimental evidence for the existence of CSCs was first proposed for hematological malignancies, more recently CSCs have been discovered in solid tumors including breast, brain, pancreatic and now bone cancers.