Abstract
Glioma is the most common and malignant primary brain tumor. Patients with malignant glioma usually have a poor prognosis due to drug resistance and disease relapse. Cancer stem cells contribute to glioma initiation, progression, resistance, and relapse. Hence, quick identification and efficient understanding of glioma stem cells (GSCs) are of profound importance for therapeutic strategies and outcomes. Ideally, therapeutic approaches will only kill cancer stem cells without harming normal neural stem cells (NSCs) that can inhibit GSCs and are often beneficial. It is key to identify the differences between cancer stem cells and normal NSCs. However, reports detailing an efficient and uniform protocol are scarce, as are comparisons between normal neural and cancer stem cells. Here, we compared different protocols and developed a fast and efficient approach to obtaining high-purity glioma stem cell by tracking observation and optimizing culture conditions. We examined the proliferative and differentiative properties confirming the identities of the GSCs with relevant markers such as Ki67, SRY-box containing gene 2, an intermediate filament protein member nestin, glial fibrillary acidic protein, and s100 calcium-binding protein (s100-beta). Finally, we identified distinct expression differences between GSCs and normal NSCs including cyclin-dependent kinase 4 and tumor protein p53. This study comprehensively describes the features of GSCs, their properties, and regulatory genes with expression differences between them and normal stem cells. Effective approaches to quickly obtaining high-quality GSCs from patients should have the potential to not only help understand the diseases and the resistances but also enable target drug screening and personalized medicine for brain tumor treatment.
Highlights
Malignant glioma is a highly lethal brain cancer, and glioblastoma (GBM) is the most aggressive glioma type
We describe the features of glioma stem cells (GSCs) origin and compare differences in the properties and regulatory genes in GSCs and neural stem cells (NSCs)
Glioma tumors were categorized as grades II–IV using the WHO guidelines (Wesseling and Capper, 2018)
Summary
Malignant glioma is a highly lethal brain cancer, and glioblastoma (GBM) is the most aggressive glioma type. The 5 year overall survival for GBM patients is less than 10% with the median survival of 14–16 months (Wankhede et al, 2012; Campos et al, 2016). It is difficult to characterize GBM subtypes posing a challenge to choose an appropriate therapeutic approach for patients due to a limited understanding of the underlying molecular biology (Campos et al, 2016; Karim et al, 2016). Glioblastoma is a highly heterogeneous tumor with various cellular subtypes (Aum et al, 2014; Soeda et al, 2015) and genetic properties (Sullivan et al, 2014; Li et al, 2015). Unlike GSCs, NSCs are tumor-tropic cells that can be used as vehicles to selectively deliver various anticancer agents to tumor sites (Mooney et al, 2018)
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