Complexity in cancer stem cells and tumor evolution: towards precision medicine
In this review, we discuss recent advances on the plasticity of cancer stem cells and highlight their relevance to understand the metastatic process and to guide therapeutic interventions. Recent results suggest that the strict hierarchical structure of cancer cell populations advocated by the cancer stem cell model must be reconsidered since the depletion of cancer stem cells leads the other tumor cells to switch back into the cancer stem cell phenotype. This plasticity has important implications for metastasis since migrating cells do not need to be cancer stem cells in order to seed a metastasis. We also discuss the important role of the immune system and the microenvironment in modulating phenotypic switching and suggest possible avenues to exploit our understanding of this process to develop an effective strategy for precision medicine.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
The Prisoner's dilemma as a cancer model
Tumor development is an evolutionary process in which a heterogeneous population of cells with differential growth capabilities compete for resources in order to gain a proliferative advantage. What are the minimal ingre…
modelA tumor-immune model of chronic myeloid leukemia with optimal immunotherapeutic protocols
The interactions between tumor cells and the immune system play a crucial role in cancer evolution. In this study, we explore how these interactions influence cancer progression by modeling the relationships among naive …
Evolutionary dynamics of cancer: from epigenetic regulation to cell population dynamics -- mathematical model framework, applications, and open problems
Predictive modeling of the evolutionary dynamics of cancer is a challenge issue in computational cancer biology. In this paper, we propose a general mathematical model framework for the evolutionary dynamics of cancer wi…
Non-hermitian operator modelling of basic cancer cell dynamics
We propose a dynamical system of tumor cells proliferation based on operatorial methods. The approach we propose is quantum-like: we use ladder and number operators to describe healthy and tumor cells birth and death, an…
Assessing the distribution of cancer stem cells in tumorspheres
In previous theoretical research, we inferred that cancer stem cells (CSCs), the cells that presumably drive tumor growth and resistance to conventional cancer treatments, are not uniformly distributed in the bulk of a t…