Recent Research Progress on The Expression of Cancer Stem Cell Biomarkers

Abstract

Cancer is the biggest cause of human death after ischemic heart disease, which places a huge burden on patients and society. Morever, scholars have to spend a lot of energy on research on early cancer screening and post diagnosis treatment. Malignant tumors can escape the monitoring of the immune system and develop metastasis and drug resistance. The research on cancer metastasis, drug resistance and recurrence has made some progress and is full of challenges. Also, cancer stem cell (CSC) has the ability of self replication. CSCs are considered to mediate the tumor progression, including but not limited to the above malignant manifestations. Because the stemness of CSCs has been confirmed by many experiments, people gradually began to pay attention to the correlation between the CSCs and other human natural stem cells, especially cell surface biomarkers. In fact, many cell biomarkers which are not expressed in normal tissues but are expressed in adult stem cells or human embryonic stem cells have been found, which provides a new possibility for cancer treatment against CSCs. In this article, we will discuss and summarize the similarities and differences in the expression of surface markers of human cancer stem cells, embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. Morever, combined with the further research of existing CSCs, such as regulating tumor proliferation and reducing CSCs drug resistance through targeted markers, this review analyzes the value and challenges of tumor stem cells in this research field. We hope that this review will provide fertile ground for early screening and treatment of cancer.