Breast cancer stem cells: tools and models one can rely on
Emmanuelle Charafe-Jauffret 
,
Christophe Ginestier and
Daniel Birnbaum
BMC Cancer 2009,
9:202doi:10.1186/1471-2407-9-202
Abstract (provisional PDF full text)
There is increasing evidence for the "cancer stem cell (CSC) hypothesis", which holds that cancers are driven by a cellular component that has stem cell properties, i.e. self-renewal, tumorigenicity and multi-lineage differentiation capacity. Researchers and oncologists currently realize how much it will modify the clinical approach of breast cancer since CSC apparently resist to therapy. Most clinical studies highlight the importance to better characterize the CSC population. Given the specific stem cell features, i.e. self-renewal and differentiation, which drive tumorigenesis and contribute to cellular heterogeneity, each marker and assay designed to isolate and characterize CSCs has to be functionally validated. In this review,
we survey tools and markers available or promising to identify breast CSCs. We review the main models used to study breast CSC and how they challenge the CSC hypothesis.
The complete article is available as a provisional PDF. The fully formatted PDF and HTML versions are in production.